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

“Foreign Secretary Ernest Bevin, far right, and Clement Attlee saw the maintenance of British rule over the oil-rich Middle East as the key to Britain’s economic survival. Fearing Arab hostility, they opposed resettling Jewish refugees in Palestine.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Neither Kerry nor Obama seems to have understood how their own personal unpopularity in Israel changed the politics of peace among Israelis. As Russian and ex-Soviet Jews watched Putin run rings around Obama on the international stage, as Mizrahi Jews from the Muslim Middle East heard the Americans echoing the flabby liberal rhetoric of a condescending Israeli establishment that despised them, and as all Israelis saw American Middle East policy floundering from one miserable mishap to the next, association with the Americans became toxic. Right-wing politicians saw no reason to conceal their disdain for the Americans and their process; on the contrary, attacking Kerry in particular brought political dividends. Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon would mock what he saw as American naïveté, messianic delusions, and arrogance to journalists. The only thing that will save Israel, he was quoted as saying, “is for John Kerry to win his Nobel Prize and leave us alone.”[”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Viewed from the region, whether from Cairo, Damascus, Tehran, Riyadh, or Jerusalem, the United States looked less formidable, less wise, less dependable, and less competent in 2012 than in 2001. This unhappy trend has continued up through the time in 2022 that I write these words.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Rather than witnessing a return to the post–Cold War democratic euphoria, the Obama years would see a further decline in the power of liberal ideology—within the United States as well as globally—and the return of full-fledged geopolitical competition between the United States and an emerging, revisionist, and illiberal Sino-Russian entente.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“But the American left stands on cultural and political foundations that are significantly different from those of Europe, and the relationship between the American left and the Jewish state has, so far at least, not broken down in quite the same way that the European-Israeli relationship has.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“The Germans expelled from Poland went to Germany; the Greeks expelled from Istanbul went to Greece. The Jews the Arabs expelled were resettled in Israel. Why could the Arabs expelled by the Israelis not go to other Arab lands for a fresh start? One can blame orientalism, racism, imperialism, or simply the sheer complexity of the issues and the history involved, but the idea that this was a conflict between Israelis and Palestinians rather than between Israelis and Arabs took many years to impress itself on western minds.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“1975, BASIC (Black Americans to Support Israel Committee) published a full-page ad in The New York Times attacking the U.N.’s “Zionism is racism” resolution. The ad cited an article by Rustin and was cosigned by several hundred prominent Black Americans, including Congressman Charles Rangel, union leaders, King’s widow, Coretta Scott King, author Ralph Ellison, and civil rights activist Rosa Parks.[”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“In Israel the workers actually did own the means of production. That a country this socialist could be both dynamic and democratic was an immense source of pride to democratic socialists across the West, and helped the left defend itself against conservative attacks. Democratic socialists across Europe and in the United States looked to Israel as a role model and”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“When I lecture and teach about Israel policy to student audiences, many are genuinely astonished to learn that during the earlier decades of its existence, Israel was more popular on the left than on the right, and more popular in Europe than in the United States. Young Europeans in particular are often shocked by a forgotten chapter in their own history.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“When President Obama turned the White House over to Donald Trump in 2017, the United States would be more hated and despised in a Middle East that was more inflamed than in 2009. During those eight years, Russia and China would emerge as bitter and determined opponents of the United States and inflict a series of setbacks on the Obama administration that eroded its authority at home and abroad.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Racial resentment among both Blacks and working-class whites was on the rise during the Obama years.[”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“While those who believe “the Jews” are responsible for everything from the weather to speculative attacks on the currencies of Muslim-majority countries continue to uphold the view that “the Jews” also gave the Iraq War to the world, this view has, as noted earlier, gradually lost currency outside the fever swamps.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“the idea that Jews and their allies exercise unique power over governments where Jewish interests are concerned has always been a cornerstone of antisemitism. The Israel lobby thesis electrified antisemites around the world as it appeared to place the authority of well-known academics behind one of the oldest, ugliest, and silliest conspiracy theories in the world.[”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“In American politics there was an additional question: Did the 9/11 attacks “prove” that Israeli hardliners were justified in their tough and distrustful stance and that one could not really make peace with Islamist fanatics,”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Strength is the foundation of the Jacksonian affinity for Israel. Jacksonians admire strength. They can be romantic retrospectively about past heroes and they admire courage against the odds and last stands. But they prefer winners to the “beautiful losers” favored by more sentimental observers of international politics. Israel’s triumph in the Six-Day War while the United States was struggling in the quagmires of Vietnam first drew the attention of Jacksonian America to the Jewish state. The refusal of the Arabs to make peace afterward, and the adoption of terrorist tactics by some Palestinians, heightened what Jacksonians saw as a contrast between a strong and upstanding nation and, again from their particular and partial point of view, what they saw as its cowardly, incompetent, and treacherous opponents.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“The United Nations charter declares that member states must respect the territorial integrity of other states. This has never been enforced on Israel’s behalf—not when Britain and the United States schemed to force Israel to give up the Negev in the early 1950s,[7] not when Arab neighbors gave aid to terrorists seeking to attack Jewish targets in Israel and beyond, not when Arab countries and, later, Iran regularly announced their intention to destroy Israel and drive its citizens into the sea.[8] The United States promised Israel in 1957 that it would protect Israel’s ability to use the Straits of Tiran if Israel returned the Sinai to Egypt.[9] To enforce that commitment, U.N. troops were dispatched to the Straits. In 1967, Nasser ordered those troops to leave. They obeyed. When Israelis asked Washington to honor its promises and prevent Nasser from blocking Israeli sea traffic, the United States was too preoccupied with the Vietnam War to respond. The U.N. was equally passive.[10]”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“In late 2000, President Bill Clinton led the peace process to what remains its high-water point when he put forward what became known as the Clinton Parameters for a final settlement to the conflict. Under those parameters, the Palestinians would receive all of Gaza, 97 percent of the West Bank, with territorial compensation elsewhere for the 3 percent (mostly densely populated Jewish settlements near Jerusalem) of West Bank territory that Israel would keep. East Jerusalem would be the capital of the Palestinian state, the Palestinian diaspora would have a “right of return” to the Palestinian state (though not to Israel), there would be an elevated train or highway connecting Gaza and the West Bank over Israeli territory, and the new state would receive $30 billion in aid. Arafat refused to sign on.[5] “I am a failure,” Clinton told Arafat. “And you have made me one.”[6]”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“There is no longer a German minority problem in the Czech Sudetenland because the Czechs drove the Germans out after World War II. The problem of the Greek and Turkish minorities in Turkey and Greece has been largely “solved” in much the same way. The Israelis and Palestinians who fantasize about driving their opponents out of the territory they want are following a well-worn road.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“The art of American statecraft lies less in choosing between idealism and realism than in judiciously blending them together.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“One must never forget that with all its faults, the Soviet government protected its Jewish citizens to the best of its abilities against Nazi invaders during the 1941–45 war and it was Soviet forces who liberated the extermination camps where the mass of the killing of European Jews took place.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“In 1979, both Egypt and Israel became still more important when the Shah of Iran, America’s key regional ally, fell from power and the Islamic Republic was born. Long the greatest beneficiary of American aid in the region, Iran now became Washington’s most implacable regional enemy.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Unable to beat the Israelis on the battlefield, the sneaky Arabs were now trying to use underhanded economic methods to undermine a brave little country and to cow the United States. One can argue whether this view of the case was entirely fair to the Arabs, but that was hardly the point politically. To most Americans, the Gulf states were backward (Saudi Arabia and North Yemen only abolished slavery in 1962; Oman abolished it in 1970),[36] bigoted (banning or persecuting non-Muslim religions), and dictatorial with little or no concern for human rights.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Americans may not be given to massive demonstrations and flag burnings to show their dislike of foreign countries, but from the 1970s forward both the Arabs, and then the Iranians after the fall of the Shah, entered the American imagination as villains.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“As Golda Meir observed in 1973, Moses had led the children of Israel through the Middle East for forty years only to bring them to the one place in the region with no oil.[”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“For the most critical years of Israel’s history, when the country was weak and poor, the United States was more interested in building relationships with Israel’s bitterest Arab opponents than with the Jewish state.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Only after Israel developed nuclear weapons and emerged as a regional superpower did it move to the center of America’s diplomatic agenda. Israel did not grow strong because it had American support. It acquired American support because it had grown strong. Those who forget this basic fact about the relationship often overestimate America’s leverage with Israel and form unrealistic ideas about the concessions that the United States can extract from Jerusalem. Those who hope that an end to the U.S.-Israel alliance would cripple the Jewish state should also take note. Israel, which was not formally designated an American ally until Ronald Reagan declared Israel a “major non-NATO ally” in 1987, desperately wanted American military and diplomatic support during its early years. Losing that support would be a serious blow today, but in a world where Russia, India, China, and Japan all admire Israeli tech and Israeli military and intelligence capabilities, if abandoned by Washington, Israel would not remain friendless for long.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“Truman, despite the obstacles and political headwinds, stuck to his principles and, as he saw it, brought thirty years of bipartisan American foreign policy to a successful conclusion. The Jewish national home was a fact, providing a refuge for persecuted Jews and allowing the United States to see refugees helped without opening its doors to a flood of immigrants. The United States had played its part in the drama through diplomatic means and international institutions only and without sending in troops. Zionist lobbying had not persuaded Truman to advance beyond the Blackstone approach; anti-Zionist lobbying in the State and Defense departments had not persuaded him to abandon it.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People

“In Washington, neither the State Department, the Pentagon, nor the CIA understood Soviet arms shipments were changing the balance of power in Palestine before May 14. Classified CIA briefings continued to predict defeat for the Jews. Seeing no alternative, President Truman spent the two months from mid-March to mid-May following the Palestine policy that the State Department so artfully had foisted on him.”
― Walter Russell Mead, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People