James Forsyth James Forsyth

‘The Arab world with its own European union’

An interview with Walter Russell Mead

The Anglo-Saxon powers have been triumphant in every major global conflict for the past 300 years. This is the kind of statement that is so sweeping that you desperately want it to be wrong. But it is right. Either Britain or America — or both — emerged victorious from the war of the Spanish succession, the war of the Austrian succession, the Seven Years’ war, the French revolutionary and Napoleonic wars, the first world war, the second world war and the Cold War. Explaining why is the task that Walter Russell Mead, the Henry A. Kissinger senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, has set himself in his new book God and Gold.

Mead is a chronicler of American power and one of the most influential foreign policy thinkers of the post-9/11 era. In a slew of agenda-setting books, he has placed current US foreign policy in its historical context, arguing that there are more precedents for the direction taken by the Bush administration than most historians care to admit.

Perhaps because he spent a year of his childhood in Surrey while his father was the local rector, Mead is more aware than most Americans of the extent to which the American world order is a continuation of the British one. Mead moved back to the United States with his family in 1964 when he was 12, but he still looks English: the tweed jacket he is wearing when we meet looks like something out of one of those English costume dramas the Americans are so fond of. He talks like an Englishman too — or at least how an Anglophile American imagines an Englishman talks — in long sweeping sentences stuffed with historical anecdotes and literary allusions.

As we sit in a café near Marble Arch, Mead tells me that the success of this Anglo-Saxon system is largely attributable to Protestantism: not so much to the Protestant work ethic as to the Protestant change ethic.

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