Quotes from Walter Russell Mead

Life isn't easy, and leadership is harder still.

You look at the steamboat, the railroad, the car, the airplane - not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world, but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture, the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans.

The Arab states don't seem to do a good job of providing for their own people, so I am not sure why they would suddenly develop an ability to help the Palestinians.

Jordan is the only Arab state that has provided citizenship to Palestinian refugees and integrated them. But something has to be done about the Palestinians living in refugee camps in Syria and Lebanon.

There is not a great sense that the Americans know what they are doing, or are making much progress in Iraq. And there is satisfaction in seeing that the Iraqis are successful in resisting the United States.

The American people are extraordinarily comfortable, affluent, and secure. It's easy for us to make the argument that God's purpose is being fulfilled through history and through the rise of American power. And to some degree, it probably is.

It is a kind of ego booster, the way Egypt's winning the 1973 war, in the first stages, was an uplift. But I did not find when I spoke to people that the war in Iraq was seen as the major issue in American-Arab relations.

This very individualistic form of Protestant Christianity that became so basic in English and then American life is to a large degree responsible for the historical success of Britain and America.

You look at the steamboat, the railroad, the car, the airplane - not all of these were invented in the Anglo-American world, but they were popularized and extended by it. They were made possible by the financial architecture, the capital intensive operations invented and developed by the Anglo-Americans.

We Americans look at the last 300 years of history, and we basically see a world that's getting better and better. The rule of freedom expands. The economy develops. We have risen to become the world's greatest power.

Life isn't easy, and leadership is harder still.

When Edward Gibbon was writing about the fall of the Roman Empire in the late 18th century, he could argue that transportation hadn't changed since ancient times. An imperial messenger on the Roman roads could get from Rome to London even faster in A.D. 100 than in 1750. But by 1850, and even more obviously today, all of that has changed.

Carter's hopes died when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan and he ended up having to reverse policy and launch the military buildup that Reagan continued. Mr. Obama would be forced back into a war on terror if terrorist groups pull off enough damaging or frightening attacks to force this issue to the fore.

Mr. Obama's approach to engagement to some degree makes him dependent on people who wish neither him nor America well. This doesn't have to end badly and I hope that it doesn't - but it's not an ideal position after one's first year in power.

We can choose not to think about our power and its meaning for ourselves or for others, but we cannot make that power disappear and we cannot prevent decisions taken in the United States from rippling out beyond our borders and shaping the world that others live in and the choices that they make. Nor can we prevent the way that others see and react to our power from shaping the world we live in and affecting the safety and security of Americans at home.

The United States is both a conservative power, defending the international status quo against those who would change it through violence, and a revolutionary power seeking to replace

The African villager with a solar powered smartphone has more access to more information than Louis XIV in the halls of Versailles.

Saying that Jesus was a moral teacher is like calling Winston Churchill a landscape painter; both statements are true (and Jesus was a much better moralist than Churchill was a painter) but in neither case does the description capture the true greatness of the person.

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.

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.

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

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.

The historian assesses that the investment of the wealthy classes in the Bank of England wedded them to the fate of the nation as a whole and to the maintenance of its stability.

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