The Wall Street Journal’s Global View columnist Walter Russell Mead wrote an excellent column for us on his interest in the subject of his new book, The Arc of a Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People. Having spoken with Walter in his office in 2015, I vividly remember his discussion of American attitudes toward the Middle East. He was finishing God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World at the time. Yet in retrospect I can see that Walter’s new book must have been a glint in his eye and a passion project for him.
Jacob Miller helps me recall some of the details of my long-ago conversation with Walter in his Jewish Insider profile/interview “Walter Russell Mead on the ‘insanity’ that led him to write a new book on American support for Israel.” It is worth your time. If anything, it is too short. It leaves me wanting more. Please check it out.
Also worth your time is the excerpt of Walter’s book published in the Wall Street Journal column “Can Biden Correct Obama’s Mistakes in the Middle East?” Here is one paragraph of the excerpt:
Neither Mr. Kerry nor Mr. Obama seems to have understood how their own personal unpopularity in Israel changed the politics of peace among Israelis. As Jews from the former Soviet Union watched Mr. Putin run rings around Mr. Obama on the international stage, as Mizrahi Jews from Muslim countries heard Americans echo the flabby liberal rhetoric of a condescending Israeli establishment that despised them, association with those Americans became toxic. Right-wing politicians saw no reason to conceal their disdain for the Americans and their process; attacking Mr. Kerry in particular brought political dividends. Defense Minister Moshe Ya’alon (2013-16), in conversations with journalists, would mock what he saw as American naiveté, messianic delusions and arrogance. The only thing that will save Israel, he was quoted as saying in 2014, “is for John Kerry to win his Nobel Prize and go home.”
As for the the question posed in the headline the Journal placed over the excerpt, I think the answer seems to be he could but he won’t.
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