Walter Russell Mead - How America Keeps Winning - [Invest Like the Best, EP.490]

A Dynamic Country in a Collapsing World

Patrick

Walter, I've been looking forward to this for many, many months. We were introduced through Jeremy Stern, who runs Colossus, who I know credits you with a lot of his skill in writing and thinking about the world. I've been so excited to do this with you. We've got such a wide range of topics that I thought it would be appropriate to begin by having you frame your view of America in the world today in very, very broad strokes. You've written a lot about how and why the UK, and then us as the successor in America, have won the last several hundred years of global affairs.

I'd love you to talk about the sweep of that winning, how you conceive of us and our role in the world today.

Walter

It's a really interesting time because on the one hand, the Pax Americana that we developed after 1945 and then refurbished in 1990 at the end of the Cold War is really in crisis. But if you step back a little bit, American power is not in crisis. The networks that we built up, the way of dealing with the world, the institutionalized relations with Europe and so on — those are all burning or crumbling.