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Conversations with Coleman
Walter Russell Mead on Christian Zionism, the ‘Israel Lobby’ Myth, and the Psychology of Antisemitism
01:02:29
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- [00:01]
UnitedHealth Group Announcer
Now finding a doctor is a little less challenging. UnitedHealth Group is investing in tools that make it easier for patients to navigate healthcare and pay less. These transparency tools help patients find providers. And this is the big compare costs upfront. The big picture more transparent pricing benefits everyone. These tools from UnitedHealth Group can help patients save hundreds of dollars annually. Learn more@unitedhealthgroup.com commitment.
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Podcast Host
Welcome to another episode of Conversations with Coleman. My guest today is Walter Russell Mead. Walter is an American foreign policy scholar, columnist, and professor known for his analysis of US Foreign policy. He's a longtime writer for the Wall Street Journal and the author of many great books, including my personal favorite, the Ark of the Covenant. In this episode, we talk about the virtues and vices of the America first movement. We talk about the history of Christian Zionism in America, which I can guarantee you is more interesting and surprising than you think. We talk about where antisemitism comes from historically and psychologically. We talk about the problems with John Mearsheimer's Israel Lobby thesis and much more. So without further ado, Walter Russell Meadow okay. Walter Russell Mead, thanks so much for coming on my show.
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Walter Russell Mead
Great to be here.
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Podcast Host
So I want to talk to you today about a set of topics that are, you know, directly in your wheelhouse, related to the many books you've written, many op EDS you've written. In particular, I'm a fan of your book the Ark of the Covenant. It's a it's really does what a great book should do, which is give you this deep context on an issue that you're never going to get from articles, really. And in that case, it's deep context on the US Israel relationship, which is center stage right now. I very recently had Glenn Greenwald on my podcast to debate the influence of the Israel Lobby over the American government, where he and I are very much on opposite sides of that issue. And so I guess I want to start there with that book. What was your goal in writing the Ark of the Covenant? What were you reacting to and how did you how does your approach to that topic differ from people like John Mearsheimer and other people that are commonly cited on this issue?
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Walter Russell Mead
Well, you know what? I usually, when I write a book or start to write a book, it's because there's something I'm curious about. I don't really understand it as well as I like, and I think it's important. And so it's worth devoting a chunk of my life to trying to sort it out. And that means that sometimes my books take me in very unexpected directions and I think make them more interesting for readers. They actually make them harder to write. But with Ark, what I saw was this. It seemed to me there are a lot of misunderstandings about the US Israel relationship. It's one of those issues that almost everybody thinks they understand and almost everybody has really strong opinions about it. There's probably maybe, with the single exception of Donald Trump, there aren't any more polarizing issues in American life right now than the US Israel relationship. And yet, just from the little bit of history that I knew before I started the book, it was clear to me that sort of both the pro Israel folks and the anti Israel folks get a lot of things wrong about that relationship. So I wanted to try to understand, okay, why do people care so much? Why are so many people wrong about this and what actually is going on? And those are the questions I tried to answer in the book. And I also, I wanted this to be a book that wouldn't be seen as, wouldn't be some kind of totally partisan, you know, yay Israel, Boo Israel or anything like that. But actually just try to lay things out, not hiding my perspective, but not trying to sort of be a mass evangelist one way or the other on it.
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Podcast Host
Yeah. One of the most interesting elements of that book is your exposition of why it is that America, you know, let's say in the 19th century, when it's really starting to become more of a world power, is by default more sympathetic to Jews than Europe was. And this is obviously before, you know, really at the beginning of the Zionism, before the Zionist movement was really at all globally relevant. Right. So there are, there were variables related to America that made America more inherently philosomatic than Europe had been. And this is something I wasn't really deeply read on. So can you talk a little bit about that?
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Walter Russell Mead
Sure. I mean, it really is remarkable that while America has never been exempt from antisemitism and the current surge that we see in antisemitism of is one of a number of historical surges, mostly thankfully short lived, but sometimes powerful that we've had. But if you compare our sort of historical track record to Europe in particular, there's just been. The waves don't go as high, they don't last as long, and they don't have such a profound impact on the lives either of Jews or anybody else. Okay, so why that and why in particular did the idea of revive, building a Jewish state in the Middle east on the kind of, you know, the ancient homeland of the land of origin of the Jewish people that has had an instinctive appeal to Americans actually since the 17th century, deep into the colonial era. So you'll find some of this was Puritan preachers writing, hey, the Bible predicts that in the last days the Jews will return to the promised land. Okay? So obviously God wants them there. So it's a good thing. Jewish state would be a great thing. There's that line of it. But that's only one piece of a much broader approach to the Jews. Historically, Christians, both Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic teaching, took this idea of supersession, I.e. that when with the crucifixion of Christ and the rejection of Christ by the majority of the Jews of the time, that was kind of the end of the role of the Jewish people in sacred history, in God's plans and in the future. Everything that was promised to the Jews in the Old Testament was actually there for the Christians, the church in the New Testament. So any talk of a special continuing relationship of God with the Jews was sort of totally out of the question. But Protestant theology, and especially Calvinist Reformed theology, as it begins to emerge in the Netherlands, France and England in the 17th century, takes a different view and says that God's promises to the Jews are irrevocable. That, okay, Jews don't believe in Jesus, which is really too bad, because they should. But God, if you read, in their view, reading the Old Testament, you read it and it's a story. The Jews are always turning away from God. You know, they're worshiping idols, they're criticizing Moses. They are, you know, you know, you just sort of read the prophecies. It's a litany of attacks on the majority of Jews at a given moment, but that God's choice and God's promise and God's love survive all that. And so they begin to see the Jews as having a continuing role in the story of salvation. This is not the kind of dispensationalist thinking that a lot of people talk about. That comes up actually somewhat later. That's more of a 19th century phenomenon. But already in the 17th and 18th century, there's a big sense that among the kinds of Christians who would be the majority of the American Christian population in the colonial and early republican era, that actually the Jews are a good thing and their survival is a good thing. Emotionally, Jews had been seen as kind of an argument against the truth of Christianity in a lot of the medieval era. Like, okay, the fact that the Jews, who certainly studied the Bible very carefully and the Old Testament in particular, Very carefully. The Tanakh is. The Jewish scriptures are known among Jews. They study them very carefully. They don't think Jesus is the Messiah. Ooh, that, you know, are we wrong? You know, is this a problem? And we need to sort of reject that other. But for the, for these Reformed Protestants in the 17th, 18th century, this becomes more. No, wait a minute. The Jews, God says in the Bible, the Jews, he will continue the Jews as a people, not because necessarily they're better than other, other people, but to show his power and his truth and his consistency. And so the survival of the Jews, you know, where are the Edomites, where are the Moabites, where are all these other ancient peoples? But here are the Jews. That starts looking to a lot of Americans as if the survival of the Jews is a proof of Christianity, not an argument against it. It shows the God of the Bible is still active in history. And I think that is still very much. This is not dispensationalism, this is not fundamentalism. But this notion that the survival of the Jewish people and their place kind of at the center of historical events testifies to the enduring presence and power of the God of Abraham in history remains, I think something of very significant form, force in American culture, spirituality and religion.
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Podcast Host
And is this is why there were some very famous American Zionists, effectively Zionists in, in like the late 19th century, before there was even really a Zionist movement to make the argument to Americans. Right. I forget who they were from your book, but am I remembering that right?
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Walter Russell Mead
Yeah, there, well, there was a, this petition known as the Blackstone Memorial, which goes to President Harrison in the late 19th century, asking that the President of the United States use his influence with the European powers to promote the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. And this. Interestingly, almost no Jews signed this. And American Jews at the time, they were not very rich as a group, they were not very numerous, they were not powerful and most of them were anti Zionists, which we can talk about later if you want. But this appeal gets signed by John D. Rockefeller, the chairman of Standard Oil, by J.P. morgan, the most powerful banker in the country, by a whole series of industrialists, by leading religious leaders across the country, newspaper editors. The New York Times, by the way, was a pro Zionist paper when it was under Christian ownership. Later a Jewish family bought it and it became an anti Zionist paper. So our whole sense of the, of the politics of this is really wildly divorced from what actually happened. For a lot of Americans, the idea of Zionism wasn't something, wasn't like, oh, no, now those Jews are going to go make us do this crazy Jewish project. It was more like, oh, finally the Jews have figured it out. We've been trying to get them to do this for years and now they finally got with the program. Actually in the middle of the, of the 19th century, the 1800s, some Americans tried to actually buy land in, outside Jerusalem to persuade Jews to start farming on the land as part of trying to build, you know, what we would today call the Zionist movement. And you can go to Jerusalem today and stay in the American Colony Hotel, which is kind of, which dates back to this American project to rebuild a Jewish state which had absolutely no buy in from Jews anywhere at the time.
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Podcast Host
That's so interesting. I'm a big fan of Haviv Retigor and how he talks about the history of Zionism. I don't know if you're aware of him, the Israeli journalist, but one of the things he really emphasizes is, you know, I think a lot of the way that Jewish Americans or, or Jews in, in Europe or or in Israel for that matter, are taught the history of Zionism, whether that's in school or through their family, is there was, you know, there was Theodore Herzl and then, you know, he had an idea and then a bunch of Jews like eventually agreed with that idea. And you combine that with some historical forces and a lot of Jews decided to go back to the homeland. Right? And it's like, that's like a cartoon version of Zionism that portrays the ideology of Zionism as the main motivating force. So in that telling, most of the Jews that ended up in Israel in like 1948 were there because they, they believed strongly that the Jewish people should return to Israel and build a state for theological and historical reasons. But if you actually look back at how it is that so many Jews ended up there, it was basically like a, a small number of ideological Zionists and then a huge number of refugees that simply couldn't go to America, which was their first choice and obviously the Holocaust. So he, he, in a way, he like retells the history from that perspective. And you know, there's something in there that is both deflating of a certain pro Zionist narrative and also deflating of an anti Zionist narrative in the sense that really the Jews who ended up in Israel fighting the war in 1948, they literally had nowhere else to go. Not like figuratively, they literally had nowhere else to go. So I'm curious if you agree with that overall characterization.
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Walter Russell Mead
Yeah, they say that home is the place that when you have to go there, they have to take you in. And in a sense, that's how Israel became a home for many Jews. But if we look at that history that you're talking about, a major force in the modern Middle east that people really don't think about very much was actually Russian policy in the 19th century. Particularly Russian policy was trying to Russianize the Russian Empire, purge it of dangerous foreign influences, a tendency that one can sometimes see even today. And actually about 2 million Muslims were driven out of the Russian Empire who mostly went south into modern Turkey, Iran, the Middle east, and then about 2 million Jews, most of whom went west, many of whom ended up in the United States.
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UnitedHealth Group Announcer
But
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Walter Russell Mead
the numbers were sort of 90 plus percent to the United States, tiny percentage to Israel to Palestine as it was known then. And the thing that changed this was nothing about Zionism. It was actually in 1923, the US after sort of 30 years of massive immigration on a scale that we'd never seen before, ended up passing a very restrictive immigration law that basically cut my immigration by about 90% from Europe and it particularly cut from Eastern Europe, so that suddenly Jews could no longer come to the United States. And many at that time began to go to Palestine. And without that decision by the United States, I don't think there'd have been enough Jews in, in, in Palestine to form the state in 1948. So, and yet the, at that time there was a small Jewish Zionist community in the United States, and they were absolutely united in fighting the immigrant. The American Jewish community was totally against immigration restrictions. So a law that the American Jewish community fought tooth and nail was historically a leading force in the creation of the Jewish state. Now how people can kind of reconcile a fact like that with the sort of urban legend that the Jews run America and that's why America supports Israel and that American support of Israel is the key factor in its existence. I don't know. People find their way, I guess. But the, but the history here is very different from the sort of superficial ideas that a lot of people have.
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Podcast Host
Okay, so let's, let's fast forward to closer to the modern day, to I guess the period covered by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Waltz, now famous or infamous, depending on who you ask. Their book, the Israel Lobby, which I think was published around 2006 or so. You know, if you were to give your potted impression, critique of their thesis in that book, what would it be?
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Walter Russell Mead
Say it's, first of all, it's not really driven by history. It's actually Driven by an intellectual problem. Because what you have is that Dr. Mearsheimer in particular is famous for a theory of international politics that says that domestic politics really don't matter very much when it comes to the foreign policy of states, that the structure of the international system drives foreign policy in states. But then he sees that he has a problem here because from his perspective, American support for Israel is not in the American interest. And so why then does the United States support Israel? And there's sort of two intellectual choices that you have here. One is to say, oops, my whole theory is wrong. And politics, domestic politics, actually plays a very large role in foreign policy. Or you can say, well, normally it doesn't, but there's one little exception, and that's the Jewish lobby, the Israel lobby. And that I think once you get into that territory, you have a lot of trouble because you're not only saying that Jews influence American foreign policy. And like every other group in American far. In the United States, Jewish Americans do try to influence, as citizens, try to influence American foreign policy. Some are pro Israel, some are anti Israel, some love Bibi, some hate Bibi. But in any case, Jews are there, as are Arab Americans, Anglo Americans, German Americans, and everybody else. But if you try to say no, that. That because Jews dominate the media and Jews have so much money that they can buy and sell candidates, that through these kind of underhanded methods, they've created a uniquely dangerous lobby. All right, then you are in a place. I mean, I think technically you can believe all this and not be an anti Semite, but it gets really, really hard not to be in, you know, because these are the classic anti Semitic libels.
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Podcast Host
Yeah, I was. I was actually set to debate Mearsheimer, and then he pulled out of the debate for. I'm not really sure actually why, but I never. In preparing for that debate, I never quite made the connection that you just explained to me between his theory of foreign policy and why American support for Israel would pose a challenge to that. Why is it that? So, first of all, if we're to look at his theory, what is that theory based on? What do you call that? Is that a flavor of realism? And how does it differ from, for instance, your overall theory of foreign policy, if you have one?
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Walter Russell Mead
Yeah, well, I think people call his. I mean, he's an international relations theorist, and so you get a lot of complicated issues. I am not an intellectual theorist of foreign policy. I'm more like a seat of the pants, you know. You know, just trying to kind of figure things out. And I might have the occasional hypotheses, but I don't really elaborate an overall theory. Somebody else could probably do that with my work and then show me what an idiot I am. I don't know. But I do think that that for me this idea that the Jews drive a Jewish lobby, maybe throw in their evangelical Christian allies, drives American foreign policy toward Israel. You try to measure that against the history and you and you have huge problems. Okay, think. All right. It's the 1930s. America is full of people from Henry Ford to Father Coughlin and lots of others who say the Jews are running America. What are Jews thinking about that time? They're thinking Hitler is destroying Jewish life in Germany and there's anti Semitism all over Europe. These desperate Jews need to go somewhere. Let's relax the immigration quotas so more Jews can come into the United States. That was the agenda. They go nowhere with that. They are completely unsuccessful. They try to get the US to boycott Nazi goods or to restrict American investment in Nazi Germany. They get nowhere. No, they politically it's a dead end. No power. During World War II, the Jewish leadership goes to Franklin Roosevelt and says, listen, can you just divert a few bombers so that they bomb the rail lines leading to AITZ and save some Jewish lives? And Roosevelt says, no, I'm not going to do it. Because if I do this, everybody has a little side project. You know, they would like us to use the bombers for this or the troops for that. Really the only thing we can do is focus on trying to end the war asap. And so that's. So we're not going to make this diversion. So the Jewish leadership doesn't even have the power to get Franklin Roosevelt to divert a few air squadrons to the rail lines to Auschwitz. But then suddenly in 1948, according to the theory, the Jews are so powerful that poor Harry Truman can't do anything but obey their orders. That's not a very good interpretation actually of what Truman did in the 40s. That's a whole other discussion. But somehow the Jews have gone from being utterly powerless in 1944 to the total masters of the United States in 1940, 48. But then what happens? Those all powerful jews, they disappear. 1956, Eisenhower sides with Egypt against Israel in the Suez war in the 56 and forces Israel to return Egyptian territory. So what happened to the all powerful Jewish lobby between 1948 and 1956? Did they get wiped out by a plague? Now the theorists, if we want to call them that, of the Jews run America school don't even try to offer a historical grounding for their views because it's so incoherent. It makes no sense. From the years when Israel needed an American alliance The most were 1948 to 1973. And those were the years when is, you know, well, in the United States was not an associate of of Israel. Not even, you know, Eisen Eisenhower wouldn't let Israeli prime ministers visit the White House. We were selling weapons to Egypt. We were giving more aid to Egypt, which was under Nasser, Israel's biggest enemy. And to Iran we were not help. And to Turkey, three Islamic countries in the region, not really helping Israel. We were not selling arms to Israel. They couldn't even buy arms then. It's really only after 1967, 69, when Israel wins the Six Day War, establishing it as the greatest military power in the Middle east and develops nuclear weapons. And the US Tried to stop Israel from getting those nuclear weapons. It was the French who made sure that the Israelis were able to get them. And they did that in part as they did a lot of things in those days to spite the United States, not to help it. But after Israel had become a regional superpower and had nuclear weapons, at that point the United States starts working with Israel, which is not really illogical by the standards of great power politics.
- [28:08]
Podcast Host
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- [29:18]
UnitedHealth Group Announcer
Now, finding a doctor is a little less challenging. UnitedHealth Group is investing in tools that make it easier for Patients to navigate healthcare and pay less. These transparency tools help patients find providers. And this is the big thing. Compare costs up front. The big picture, more transparent pricing benefits everyone. And These tools from UnitedHealth Group can help patients save hundreds of dollars annually. Learn more@unitedhealthgroup.com commitment.
- [29:49]
Podcast Host
You know, one of my critiques of Mearsheimer and Walt's book is that their definition of the Israel lobby borders on circularity in the following way. So, like, if I were, let's say I were going to try to study the power of the Israel lobby in an intellectually honest way, what I would do is I would first come up with a strict and coherent definition of what a lobbyist is as opposed to what is just an American citizen with a strong opinion. Because, you know, an American citizen with a strong opinion, let's say, okay, I'm, I'm half Puerto Rico. I'm half Puerto Rican, right? My grandparents are from Puerto Rico. I grew up speaking Spanish with them. It's like an important issue. I know a lot more about it than I would if I weren't Puerto Rican. Maybe that informs my opinions or maybe there's a religious reason why I write. So There are like 10 different routes a person can come to strongly held foreign policy beliefs. It can be religious, it can be family, it can be. You read Marx and you were really persuaded by it. And now you think our foreign policy should be to support communism around the world because that's what's best for the world. Right. Any number of reasons. None of that is actually lobbying. Right. So all of that is just democratic politics, maybe ideological, but whatever. And, and so your definition of what's in the US interest can be arrived at in any number of ways. It's only really lobbying when you are, you are part of a registered lobbying organization and you're talking to congressmen, trying to persuade them to your point of view. And whether legally or illicitly, there have been cases of bribes. There was Korea gate in the 70s where South Korea is trying to bribe Congress to get favorable policy and so forth. So I would come up with a strict definition and then I would look at all the edge cases of policy that would have helped that Israel wanted and Israel didn't want. And I would see whether the lobby got its way in some big data set, right. And whether that, whether that has covaried with the lobby's spending power over time or something. Right. But what Mearsheimer and Walt do is they define any American. Whether you're at a think tank, whether you're basically a journalist or a writer who has, who believes in strong ties between the US and Israel, as by definition a part of the lobby. And, and this is circular because then it means anything they do or say that persuades you, that persuades people in power that supporting Israel is in the U.S. interest is by definition the lobby working. Right. Even if it's actually not formal lobbying work. And by this definition, I would argue you could, you would have to argue that there is a lobby on the other side that is very powerful. You know, someone like Zoran Mamdani. Right. I would never consider him to be part of the pro Palestine lobby. Like, I would never say that because that's, that's ridiculous. Unless you can tell me he's a part of an organization. But he has said openly, and you could find this on, on YouTube, Palestine was the most important issue that got me into politics. That's what he says. He says Palestine was my main issue. And then through pro Palestine politics, I learned about socialism and that was my journey. Right. If a Jewish American had said this and gone on to become mayor, Mearsheimer would include that person as part of the pro Israel lobby, even if they were never a lobbyist. Right. So there is a circularity to their definition that I think really undermined. I mean, Marco Rubio is another interesting case because he has talked about how important his Cuban heritage is and his, his parents having fled Cuba, like on the eve of, of revolution and not being able to go back and all that. And this is very important to him. It's pretty well known that he is deeply anti communist, especially in Latin America, directly as a result of his family, family story. So if I were to put on my Mearsheimer hat and define lobbies in the way that they do, I would say, well, Marco Rubio is compromised in dealing with Venezuela, Right. Because we know he's not thinking purely about the American interest. He's influenced by his family ties, his hatred of communism in, in, in, in Latin America. And therefore he's part of a de facto lobby of anti communists in Latin America. And he wants us and he's willing to support them, even when it may not be in, in the American interest. But you've, interestingly, you've never heard me, never heard anyone make that argument when he was running point on Venezuela, even though it was there to be made. And in some way that it's the dog that didn't bark.
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Walter Russell Mead
Yeah, well, I think part of what goes on here is that actually I'll step back and just say on the, on the Israel lobby front, I think there's another problem, which is that
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Podcast Host
if
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Walter Russell Mead
you go back to say the 1990s when the Clinton administration was spending huge amounts of time trying to get a peace agreement that would establish a Palestinian state on the west bank and in Gaza, you had some American Jews sort of arguing against that because they didn't think this was a good idea. And you had some American Jews wanting the United States to push Israel harder to make concessions to the Palestinians to get that two state solution. For Mearsheimer and Walt, the people actually trying to get Clinton to put more pressure on Israel to make concession to the Palestinians were part of the Israel lobby. So you have an Israel lobby that is sometimes trying to use the US to push Israel. It's a. So, you know, and so then either way you win. If the US Pushes Israel. Aha, the Jewish lobby, the Israel lobby is winning. And if the U.S. you know, sort of steps away or, you know, lets Bibi put more settlements in the west bank or whatever, you know, criteria you want to use, ah, the Israel lobby has won. So no matter what the outcome is, it's evidence for the claim that the Israel lobby is running things. And once, once you get to that level, you sort of, I think you're, you're no longer talking science or in any sensible way. This is just, you know, this is kind of opinion run riot.
- [36:47]
Podcast Host
Yeah. Okay. Another question I want to ask you as someone that is deeply researched on, on, you know, the history of, let's say, American and European attitudes towards Jews. Where do you think anti Semitism comes from ultimately? And what do you think explains the durability of anti Semitic beliefs in, in the world? Because it's, you know, there's a lot of groups out there that could in theory be hated and talked about constantly and, and, and so forth, but it's really, you know, among, there's many bigotries, obviously bigotry goes in every direction, but it's really just the Jews, 15 million people, really a tiny slice of the world population that, that have sustained this like thousands years long obsession. So what actually explains that in, in terms of the human psychology?
- [37:53]
Walter Russell Mead
Well, now you're getting into some deep waters. If I look at Western history and we just talk for the moment about antisemitism as a Western phenomenon. I think a lot of it goes back into the, you know, think about the Middle Ages, early Middle Ages, and you think about how weak society seemed to be. You know, we think of, we talk about, you know, the, you know, Charlemagne and the you know, the, the empire, but really the government at that time is like the king and a handful of knights who may or may not be loyal. And it doesn't really have a bureaucracy. You know, there's not in every city, every town, somebody who runs things, who has a police force that they can call on. The state is incredibly weak. And it kind of, and what holds society together is not the army or something, it's opinion. It's the belief, for example, that if you, if you sin, God will punish you. It's that sin is a bad thing. It's that you should be loyal to the king because the Bible tells you to obey rulers and all. And so this very weak society, anybody who dissents is a threat. And here you see these communities of Jews and they don't believe that, you know, when the archbishop puts the sign of the cross, you know, puts the cross, sign of the cross in oil on the forehead of the son of the last king, they don't believe that that makes this person the God, God's anointed king. They don't believe that your Christian laws derived from the New Testament and, and Roman law are the right laws. They have their own laws that they think are better. And they're kind of a threat. They're a threat. And the, and the, they're also, they become economically a threat because Middle Ages didn't have a particularly strong understanding of economics. The king, you go to war, the king needs a lot of money. Takes a lot of money to fight a war. But how does the, how, how do you get money in those days? You don't with, you know, withhold a percentage of everyone's income from their income statements and send them a W2 at the end of the year. You have none of that. Right. You have feudal dues. And the peasants at this manor are supposed to give like 10% of their rutabaga crop to the lord of the manor. And out of that the lord is supposed to do X and Y. Well, you cannot. There's no rutabaga futures market that you can sell this stuff on, you know, to raise a lot of money easily. Yeah. And you have, you know, so where do you get it? You get it from money lenders. There were Christian money lenders too, but Jews with a different religious law are ready to stand in and, and, and, and provide money. And this strikes a lot of people just instinctively as evil, you know.
- [41:09]
Podcast Host
Right.
- [41:10]
Walter Russell Mead
So you have a mysterious, evil, powerful group. And because they can provide money, the king says, well, come on in, let's talk who have access to the highest levels. You don't understand how it works, you don't understand what they're doing, but you don't like it. And I think that mix of fear and dislike and a sense of them as a potentially threatening group that are in your society but not loyal to your society has a big role in the kind of formation of a, of a historical, psychological and emotional anti Semitism. And in the 1300s, Jews get kicked out of England, they get kicked out of France, they get kicked out of Spain in the, in the 1400s. So this kind of, this swelling tides of antisemitism reflect a deep inner fear about the strength of your own society, the place of your own society, and a kind of skepticism about your religion and your, you know, and even in a sense, your salvation. If the Jews are right and Jesus isn't the Messiah, then what happens to me when I die? What has happened to my grandmother when she died? So the Jews become a focus for a lot of kind of scapegoating energy, I think. And once that gets embedded into the culture and you can always again go back and you, you know, you read in the, in the Bible now people were not reading the Bible in, in their own languages, but you would see, hear the stories of the crucifixion, you know, his blood be on us and on our children. Or you'd see Jesus arguing with the Pharisees and the Sadducees or the Jews punishing the Apostle Paul. So you had this sense of them as the enemies of what was good and right. All of this, I think, sort of becomes a sort of a cultural unity in the Western mind and it gets revived in modern times because in sort of 19th century Europe, as all of these nationalisms are coming to be, you know, in 1800, people didn't think of themselves as a Czech or a Yugoslav or you know, a Serb or something like that necessarily. Their identities were more fluid. Most people in Europe lived in multinational, multi confessional empires. But a sense of, oh, wait a minute, I'm a Hungarian, I'm a Czech, and there needs to be a Czech state where Czech is the official language and Czech people watch out for one another and work with one another, you know, and, and the rich Czechs take care of the poor Czechs because we're all in this together. That becomes a big force in 19th century European history. And again, the Jews who are scattered in all of these different countries, well, are the Jews in Prague? How loyal are they to Czechs? Are the Jews in Germany really German or are they something more suspicious? So the medieval kind of foundation of Western antisemitism become, gets modernized in the 19th century in the era of nationalism. And so now it's kind of a double whammy that comes in the 20th century, gets globalized and gets conflated with anti colonialism and a lot of other things. But this, one of the West's most successful cultural exports in the 20th century has been the ideology of antisemitism. Some follow the noise, Bloomberg follows the money. Whether it's the funds fueling AI or crypto's trillion dollar swings, there's a money side to every story. Get the money side of the story. Subscribe now@bloomberg.com
- [45:11]
Podcast Host
right? Yeah. And you see that in, you know, the Hamas charter is just copy. You know, it had its Islamic sources of anti Semitism as well, but it also just copy pasted the handiwork that the west had done for the past many years.
- [45:26]
Walter Russell Mead
Because anti Semitism plays a role in the modernization. It's a process of intellectual modernization, national identity development and recovery. It's also, I think, part of an anti capitalist mix that, you know, while capitalism has made far more people richer and better off than at any time in, in the history of the world, it's it, it doesn't always feel good and it doesn't always work out as well for everybody. And so you people would see the Jews, you know, connected to bankers, international finance, the Rothschilds, these other people, so you have that extra kind of trigger of antisemitism. When I think about in American life, one of the great moments of antisemitism comes in the 1880s and 90s among farmers who were protesting what they see as the sort of despotism of the banks, New York banks tied to the London banks. And, and if you look at William Jennings Bryan's nomination speech, the famous speech at the Democratic Party, he says, thou shalt not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. It's an anti Semitic dog whistle. It is, you know, because in popular views the Jews crucified Christ, cross of gold. Well, that's what bankers do. He's identifying the banking interest with the Jews who crucified the savior of the world. And this, so the, the anti capitalism nationalism and the sense of feeling threatened in the security of your own society and its institutions, those things all push people in anti Semitic directions. And I think we see a lot of that today.
- [47:34]
Podcast Host
Right. I think I'm a big fan of Thomas Sowell and I don't know if you've read his essay, Are Jews Generic?
- [47:43]
Walter Russell Mead
I have not and I need to. He is really great.
- [47:46]
Podcast Host
Yeah, it's a great, it's a slightly weird title that, you know, it can land on the ear in the wrong way. But the thesis is actually just that. Yeah, you mentioned it sort of in passing. That people don't intuitively naturally have an understanding of economics. And so we understand that the farmer creates value because he's making crops with his own hand. We understand that the factory worker creates value because he's on an assembly line using his hands to make something tangible, something that has weight that I can purchase. Humans don't naturally understand the role of either banking or middlemen. Now it turns out every society that you or your recent ancestors wanted to move to in order to go from rags to riches had and benefited from a great banking system that is not an accident. A great finance system is crucial to economic progress, to the reason why we're no longer all farmers and that we can make, you know, we can, we're, we're now, now we're in a situation where, you know, the, the, the poor are more likely to be overweight than underweight. You know, this is an enormous, enormous boon to civilization. Finance plays a functioning financial system plays a role in that, that people don't naturally, don't come out of the womb understanding. And if you don't really learn it in school, you're not going to. Same with middlemen. Right. People that don't actually make the things, they buy them from one person and then sell them to another. That plays a crucial role in economies. Right. And, and, but it's a role that people don't necessarily understand. It's a role that's easily misunderstood as exploitative. Oh, you're just hiking up the price. You're just, you're just basically making things arbitrarily expensive. Well, no, there's. Every time. And so what. What so shows is that every time societies around the world misunderstand that role and end up expelling ethnic groups that specialize in that role, the economy tends to suffer as a result.
- [49:54]
Walter Russell Mead
Yep.
- [49:54]
Podcast Host
And it's not unique to Jews. That's, that's actually the crucial insight of that essay is that Jews happen to play this role for many historic reasons of historical accident in Europe. But if you look in Africa, you know, the Lebanese have played that role in West Africa. The, the Indians and Pakistanis played that role in East Africa and Uganda. And they were actually expelled using very, you know, basically all the same arguments that like Hitler and Nazis Used if you look at that, you know, the famous propaganda video, the Eternal Jew. It's like the. The same exact arguments were said by the indigenous Africans about the. The Indians. Yep. And they expelled them in the 1970s or whatever it was. And so this is a common phenomenon in human psychology. It just happens. The Jews happen to be the most salient example of who it's been done to.
- [50:51]
Walter Russell Mead
And a big re. You know, you can see that very much in sort of third world socialism which exp. You know, which tries to destroy that commercial middle ground often. You know, Nasser expelled the Greeks from Egypt. You know, there's, there's a lot of that going on. Then when those people are gone, you've got to somehow by state stores and state planning, you try to replace the work of that commercial class and you find it really sucks. And that, you know, nobody has anything and everything works badly. And then you start getting corruption and so on coming in to fill the void essentially. But what that has meant is that that's been one of the ways, I think, in which the path for antisemitism has been prepared in a lot of global south socialist and quasi socialist thinking because the anti middleman campaign become so ingrained into their theory and their practice. And then obviously when things don't work out well, whose fault is that? It's the Jews. You know, they're not here anymore, but they're obviously still causing our problems because it couldn't be that we have caused our problems. That can't be true. I think another factor which does help explain the kind of globalization of anti Israel and anti Semitic feeling is the notion of illegitimate immigration. That when your country was under, say the British Empire, say if you're modern, Malaysia, when the British were ruling what is now Malaysia, lots of Chinese immigrants came into Malaysia either to work on plantations for the British or commercially or whatever. And the Malay population hated this. A lot of the native Malay population hated and resented it. And so after independence, this sort of, you know, the, the fissure between the melee indigenous people and the Chinese, the illegitimate, as people would say Chinese immigrants, we never consented, said the Malays. This was the imperial overlords who did it. And so Malaysia today is a real hotbed of pro Palestinian feeling because they see the Palestinian experience of the Jews allowing, of the British allowing Jewish immigration when Palestine was part of the British Empire is exactly what happened to them. And we can see that this is a factor in many different countries. Ways in which the Israeli Palestinian conflict echoes their own experience with the west or with Colonization. And so you get kind of a
- [54:03]
Podcast Host
mix of Ireland would be another example there, right?
- [54:05]
Walter Russell Mead
Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. The Irish feelings about Northern Ireland and Ireland is now a very anti Israel, certainly has a very anti Israel government. I won't say that it's an anti Israel country. That's another question. So you, you definitely have. And, and I think you can see in the US today where there are a lot of people who feel that, you know, illegal migration under, as they would say, under the Biden administration or whatever, you know, this deep resentment toward immigrants whose presence in your mind you've never consented to, is a really important driving force in politics. And I think it may even explain some of the anti Semitism on the far right today is in and in American history in general, at times when immigration levels have been unusually high and therefore anti immigrant feeling is unusually high, antisemitism tends to flare at those times as well.
- [55:11]
Podcast Host
Okay, I want to, I want to ask you in general terms about the America first movement and philosophy right now. What, what are your feelings about whether America should project power abroad and if so, what our priorities should be? And how do you view the America first feeling that is you know, represented sort of by J.D. vance, Nick Fuentes? You don't have to deal with the anti Semitism bit because that's, we've talked, I think enough about that, but this sense that we just should not be that involved in the world, we're spending, you know, 60 to $100 billion on these military bases all around the world and we could be spending that at home and so forth. What are your views on that?
- [56:04]
Walter Russell Mead
Yeah, I guess it's complicated, but life is complicated because I think on the one hand, if we look back, particularly since the end of the Cold War, the globalist agenda, as a lot of it's been portrayed and a lot of people in power have bought into it, there's a wide gap between that and what a lot of Americans think our policies should be. So, you know, should people on the right might say, well, really like how much should the United States be pushing gay rights in Uganda or people in the blue collar movement say, should we be offering tax deductions to American companies who relocate to China and both build up a strong competitor and you know, put American workers out of, out of business? Should we really be doing that? And I think there are ways in which I think you have to be America first if you, if you want to be a leader of this country. I don't think you can get elected on an America Second. Or America third or America fifth platform. And so whatever your views on American international engagements abroad, they have to be grounded and clearly grounded in a sensible common sense understanding of what American security and what American economic interests. And by that I mean the economic interests and the security of the American people, not some sort of hypothetical elite or something like that. Then we do have to start from that position. And so to that. And I think some of the folks who particularly are in the democracy promotion business really got way ahead of their skis, leaned very far over their skis. I don't think America is actually very good at promoting democracy hither and thither around the world. People say, well, what about Germany and Japan? I say, yeah, well, step one is to destroy every city practically in those countries. And then step two, for the next five years, you control exactly how much they can eat every day. And you take physical control of those countries and you rule them. Okay, that's step one, maybe, if, you know. But are we really, how many countries are we willing to do that in or able to do that in today? So I think we do need. I think the globalist agenda needs to be ratcheted back a bit and made to resonate more with common sense. But I think you can, you then. So that far I'd say, hey, I'm America first too. But I think you can go, you can go, you can fall off the, you know, the other side of, of the fence. And you can, you can go from saying, okay, gay rights, promotion of gay rights in Uganda or land distribution in, I don't know, Botswana is a step too far for the United States. Okay, but then you can also go the other way and say nothing that happens in the Middle east or in Europe matters one way or the other to the United States. Right. And that, I think is equally extreme in the other direction. In fact, it is. Let's just take the Middle east, for example. I think we've all seen from the effects of the war with Iran that if shipping closes down in the Straits of Hormuz in the Persian Gulf, the effects on the global economy and therefore on the American economy, are enormous. Every time you go to the gas station, you say, maybe I do have some interest in the Middle east every time. And we're going to see more, you know, if stock markets tank, your retirement account is tanking, your company is laying off people because your customers in Europe or elsewhere don't have enough money. The health of the world economy is connected in very direct ways to the health of the American economy. Now, I'M not saying from that all of our Middle east policies are smart or advance the national interest. That's a completely different debate and a very healthy one. But the idea that what happens in the Gulf stays in the Gulf, I just don't think makes sense. And I would also say when I look at, say, Taiwan or East Asia, which is another place where some people say, what's the American interest there? Why do we care about Taiwan? We say that, that when I, When I go to Japan and talk to people there, what I hear is that if China were to take over Taiwan, Japan would have no choice but to kind of make a deal with China. That China would basically control this. Most of the sea routes that Japan needs for trade with Europe and its access to oil and so on and so forth.
- [61:26]
UnitedHealth Group Announcer
Forth.
- [61:28]
Walter Russell Mead
And if you, if ch. If Japan with its financial and technological abilities go. And. And Korea would even South Korea would even more have to do that from sort of the American alliance system into a ch. New Chinese system and you throw in the chip production and so on from Taiwan and the, the, the economic weight of that, I think you see a change in the world that really matters. Again, not sort of abstractly to some idea of American power, but to the safety and the security and the prosperity of the average American family.
- [62:06]
Podcast Host
Okay. Walter Russell Mead, thanks so much for coming on my show.
- [62:10]
Walter Russell Mead
Great to be here. Hope to see you again soon.
- [62:13]
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