Walter Russell Mead (born 12 June, 1952, Columbia, South Carolina) is the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow for U.S. foreign policy at the Council on Foreign Relations and one of the country's leading students of American foreign policy. Mead's father, Loren Mead, is an Episcopal priest in Washington, D.C. who grew up in several places in the South. Walter received his B.A. in English Literature from Yale University, but never went to graduate school, though he took several courses which helped expand his intellect as well as understanding of politics and the dynamics of American foreign policy. He is also an honors graduate of Groton School and Yale, where he received prizes for history, debate, and the translation of the New Testament in Ancient Greek. In addition to his position at the Council, Mead currently teaches American foreign policy at Bard College. He claims he has been a lifelong Democrat. In 2003 Mead supported the Iraq War.
Writings
Mead regularly writes for several journals, magazines and newspapers such as Foreign Affairs, The New Yorker, and Wall Street Journal. He is currently on the staff of Foreign Affairs as a book reviewer and on the editorial board of The American Interest. Mead wrote a famous quotation in a 1992 article, "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 30's." (New Perspectives Quarterly, Summer 1992). This quotation is frequently used in high school and college policy debate to illustrate that a collapse of the modern industrial economy would create the danger of international conflict, possibly involving nuclear weapons. The quote has achieved a degree of comic infamy in these circles, as it is often cited as one of the most popular pieces of debate evidence of all time, due to the forcefulness with which Mead makes the claim. For example, see, "Top 10 Debate Cards of All Time,". 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 awarded to the most important historical book published. Special Providence, which stemmed from an article originally published in the Winter 1999/2000 issue of The National Interest entitled "The Jacksonian Tradition," 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. 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. It is about the Anglo-American tradition of world power (increasingly referred to as the Anglosphere).
