Walter Russell Mead Quotes
Although war cannot be ended, wars can.
Walter Russell Mead, Editor-at-Large of The American Interest, Co-founder of the New America Foundation, Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations “Peace Out”, Foreign Affairs, November / December 2012
Sourced by: Eigen's Political and Historical Quotations
The documentation of this quotation comes from a memorandum summarizing the meeting written by Presidential aide Harry Hopkins.
This was the week after he returned from his meeting with Hitler in Munich where he appeased the German Dictator. See {585941} for his famous naive statement.
This is one of the earliest instances in which formal American foreign policy called for aggressively preventing other nations from war. This speech was audio recorded -- quite unusual for the time -- and can be heard to this day.
This was in the middle of the Cold War and the political leaders had to face the fact that their major military nuclear weapons, as a practical matter, could not be used. The result was not only too destructive but retaliation would produce MAD: Mutually Assured Destruction.
Walter Russell Mead is an American academic. He is the James Clarke Chace Professor of Foreign Affairs and Humanities at Bard College and taught American foreign policy at Yale University. He was also the editor-at-large of The American Interest magazine. Mead is a columnist for The Wall Street Journal and a scholar at the Hudson Institute.