Walter Russell Mead on Christian Zionism, the ‘Israel Lobby’ Myth, and the Psychology of Antisemitism

30:28Coleman Hughes:I grew up speaking Spanish with them. It's like an important issue. I know a lot more about it than I would if I weren't Puerto Rican. Maybe that informs my opinions. Or maybe there's a religious reason why I, right? So there are like 10 different routes a person can come to strongly held foreign policy beliefs. It can be religious. It can be family. It can be, you read Marx and you were really persuaded by it. And now you think our foreign policy should be to support communism around the world because that's what's best for the world, right? Any number of reasons. None of that is actually lobbying, right?

30:58So all of that is just democratic politics.

31:04Coleman Hughes:It may be ideological, but whatever. And so your definition of what's in the U.S. interest can be arrived at in any number of ways. It's only really lobbying when you are part of a registered lobbying organization and you're talking to congressmen, trying to persuade them to your point of view. And whether legally or illicitly, you know, there have been cases of bribes. There was Koreagate in the 70s where South Korea is trying to bribe Congress to, you know, get favorable policies. and so forth. So I would come up with a strict definition, and then I would look at all the edge cases of policy that would have helped that Israel wanted and Israel didn't want, and I would see whether the lobby got its way in some big data set, right?

31:53Coleman Hughes:And whether that has co-varied with the lobby's spending power over time or something, right? But what Mearsheimer and Walt do is they They define any American, whether you're at a think tank, whether you're basically a journalist or a writer, who believes in strong ties between the U.S. and Israel as, by definition, a part of the lobby. And this is circular because then it means anything they do or say that persuades people in power that supporting Israel is in the U.S. interest is by definition the lobby working, right? Even if it's actually not formal lobbying work. And by this definition, I would argue, you would have to argue that there is a lobby on the other side that is very powerful.

32:50Coleman Hughes:You know, someone like Zoran Mamdani, right? I would never consider him to be part of the pro-Palestine lobby. Like, I would never say that because that's ridiculous unless you can tell me he's a part of an organization. But he has said openly, and you could find this on YouTube, Palestine was the most important issue that got me into politics. That's what he says. He says, Palestine was my main issue. And then through pro-Palestine politics, I learned about socialism. And that was my journey, right? If a Jewish American had said this and gone on to become mayor, Mearsheimer would include that person as part of the pro-Israel lobby, even if they were never a lobbyist, right?

33:32Coleman Hughes:So there was a circularity to their definition that I think really undermined. I mean, Marco Rubio is another interesting case because he's talked about how important his Cuban heritage is and his parents having fled Cuba like on the eve of revolution and not being able to go back and all that. And this is very important to him. It's pretty well known that he is deeply anti-communist, especially in Latin America, directly as a result of his family story. So if I were to put on my Mearsheimer hat and define lobbies in the way that they do, I would say, well, Marco Rubio is compromised in dealing with Venezuela, right?

34:15Coleman Hughes:because we know he's not thinking purely about the American interest. He's influenced by his family ties, his hatred of communism in Latin America. And therefore, he's part of a de facto lobby of anti-communists in Latin America. And he's willing to support them even when it may not be in the American interest. But interestingly, you've never heard anyone make that argument when he was running point on Venezuela, even though it was there to be made. And in some way, it's the dog that didn't bark. Yeah. Well, I think part of what goes on here is that—actually, I'll step back and just say on the Israel lobby front, I think there's another problem, which is that if you go back to, say, the 1990s, when the Clinton administration was spending huge amounts of time trying to get a peace agreement that would establish a Palestinian state on the West Bank and in Gaza, you had some American Jews sort of arguing against that because they didn't think this was a good idea.

35:27And you had some American Jews wanting the United States to push Israel harder to make concessions to the Palestinians to get that two-state solution. For Mearsheimer and Wall, the people actually trying to get Clinton to put more pressure on Israel to make concessions to the Palestinians were part of the Israel lobby. So you have an Israel lobby that is sometimes trying to use the U.S. to push Israel. It's a, so, you know, and so then either way you win. If the U.S. pushes Israel, aha, the Jewish lobby, the Israel lobby is winning. And if the U.S., you know, sort of steps away or, you know, let's Bibi put more settlements in the West Bank or whatever criteria you want to use.

36:24Ah, the Israel lobby has won. So no matter what the outcome is, it's evidence for the claim that the Israel lobby is running things. And once you get to that level, you're sort of, I think you're no longer talking science or in any sensible way. This is just, you know, this is kind of opinion run riot. Yeah.

36:48Coleman Hughes:Okay, another question I want to ask you as someone that is deeply researched on the history of, let's say, American and European attitudes towards Jews. where do you think anti-Semitism comes from ultimately? And what do you think explains the the durability of anti-Semitic beliefs in the world? Because it's, you know, there's a lot of groups out there that could in theory be hated and talked about constantly and so forth. But it's really, you know, among, there's many bigotries, obviously. Bigotry goes in every direction, but it's really just the Jews, 15 million people, really a tiny slice of the world population that have sustained this like thousands years long obsession.

37:46Coleman Hughes:So what actually explains that in terms of the human psychology? Well, now you're getting into some deep waters. If I look at Western history, and we just talked for the moment about anti-Semitism as a Western phenomenon, I think a lot of it goes back into the, you know, think about the Middle Ages, early Middle Ages. And you think about how weak society seemed to be. We talk about the Charlemagne and the empire, but really the government at that time is like the king and a handful of knights who may or may not be loyal. And it doesn't really have a bureaucracy. There's not in every city, every town, somebody who runs things, who has a police force that they can call on.

38:44The state is incredibly weak. and what holds society together is not the army or something. It's opinion. It's the belief, for example, that if you sin, God will punish you. It's that sin is a bad thing. It's that you should be loyal to the king because the Bible tells you to obey rulers and all. And so this very weak society, anybody who dissents is a threat. And here you see these communities of Jews, and they don't believe that when the archbishop puts the sign of the cross in oil on the forehead of the son of the last king, they don't believe that that makes this person God's anointed king.

39:40They don't believe that your Christian laws derived from the New Testament and Roman law are the right laws. They have their own laws that they think are better. And they're kind of a threat. They're a threat. And they're also, they become economically a threat. Because Middle Ages didn't have a particularly strong understanding of economics. the king you go to war the king needs a lot of money takes a lot of money to fight a war but how does the how do you get money in those days you don't with you don't withhold a percentage of everyone's income from their income statements and send them a w-2 at the end of the year you have none of that right you have feudal dues and the peasants at this manor are supposed to give like 10 % of their rutabaga crop to the Lord of the manor.

40:37And out of that, the Lord is supposed to do X and Y. Well, you cannot, there's no rutabaga futures market that you can sell this stuff on, you know, to raise a lot of money easily. Yeah. And you have, you know, so where do you get it? You get it from money lenders. There were Christian money lenders too, but Jews with a different religious law are ready to stand in and provide money. And this strikes a lot of people just instinctively as evil. So you have a mysterious, evil, powerful group, and because they can provide money, the king says, well, come on in, let's talk, who have access to the highest levels.

41:20You don't understand how it works. You don't understand what they're doing, but you don't like it. And I think that mix of fear and dislike and a sense of them as a potentially threatening group that are in your society but not loyal to your society has a big role in the kind of formation of a historical, psychological, and emotional anti-Semitism. And in the 1300s, Jews get kicked out of England. They get kicked out of France. They get kicked out of Spain in the 1400s. So this kind of swelling tides of anti-Semitism reflect a deep inner fear about the strength of your own society, the place of your own society, and a kind of skepticism about your religion and even in a sense your salvation.

42:18If the Jews are right and Jesus isn't the Messiah, then what happens to me when I die? What has happened to my grandmother when she died? So the Jews become a focus for a lot of kind of scapegoating energy, I think. And once that gets embedded into the culture, and you can always, again, go back and you read in the Bible. Now, people were not reading the Bible in their own languages, but you would hear the stories of the crucifixion. And, you know, his blood be on us and on our children. Or you'd see Jesus arguing with the Pharisees and the Sadducees. Or the Jews punishing the Apostle Paul. So you had this sense of them as the enemies of what was good and right.

43:09All of this, I think, sort of becomes a sort of a cultural unity in the Western mind. And it gets revived in modern times because in sort of 19th century Europe, as all of these nationalisms are coming to be, you know, in 1800, people didn't think of themselves as a Czech or a Yugoslav or, you know, a Serb or something like that necessarily. Their identities were more fluid. Most people in Europe lived in multinational, multi-confessional empires. But a sense of, oh, wait a minute, I'm a Hungarian. I'm a Czech. And there needs to be a Czech state where Czech is the official language. And Czech people watch out for one another and work with one another.

43:58And the rich Czechs take care of the poor Czechs because we're all in this together. That becomes a big force in 19th century European history. And again, the Jews who are scattered in all of these different countries, well, are the Jews in Prague, how loyal are they to Czechs? Are the Jews in Germany really German, or are they something more suspicious? So the medieval kind of foundation of Western anti-Semitism gets modernized in the 19th century in the era of nationalism. And so now it's kind of a double whammy that comes in. in the 20th century gets globalized and gets conflated with anti-colonialism and a lot of other things.

44:42But this, one of the West's most successful cultural exports in the 20th century has been the ideology of anti-Semitism. Right.

44:53Coleman Hughes:Yeah. And you see that in, you know, the Hamas charter is just, you know, it had its Islamic sources of anti-Semitism as well, but it also just copy-pasted the handiwork that the West had done for the past many hundreds of years. Exactly, because anti-Semitism plays a role in the modernization, it's sort of process of intellectual modernization, national identity, development, and recovery. It's also, I think, part of an anti-capitalist mix. Right. That, you know, while capitalism has made far more people richer and better off than at any time, in the history of the world, it doesn't always feel good, and it doesn't always work out as well for everybody.

45:39And so people would see the Jews connected to bankers, international finance, the Rothschilds, these other people. So you have that extra kind of trigger of anti-Semitism. When I think about in American life, one of the great moments of anti-Semitism comes in the 1880s and 90s among farmers who were protesting what they see as the sort of despotism of the banks, New York banks tied to the London banks. And if you look at William Jennings Bryan's nomination speech, the famous speech at the Democratic Party, he says, thou shalt not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold. It's an anti-Semitic dog whistle.

46:35It is, you know, because in popular views, the Jews crucified Christ, cross of gold. Well, that's what bankers do. He's identifying the banking interest with the Jews who crucified the savior of the world. And this, so the anti-capitalism, nationalism, and the sense of feeling threatened in the security of your own society and its institutions, those things all push people in anti-Semitic directions. And I think we see a lot of that today.

47:16Coleman Hughes:Right. I think I'm a big fan of Thomas Sowell, and I don't know if you've read his essay, Are Jews Generic? I have not, and I need to. He is really great. Yeah, it's a great essay. It's a slightly weird title that, you know, it can land on the ear in the wrong way, but the thesis is actually just that. You mentioned it sort of in passing, that people don't intuitively naturally have an understanding of economics. And so we understand that the farmer creates value because he's making crops with his own hand. We understand that the factory worker creates value because he's on an assembly line using his hands to make something tangible, something that has weight that I can purchase.

48:03Coleman Hughes:Humans don't naturally understand the role of either banking or middlemen. Now, it turns out every society that you or your recent ancestors wanted to move to in order to go from rags to riches had and benefited from a great banking system. That is not an accident. A great finance system is crucial to economic progress to the reason why we're no longer all farmers and that we can make, you know, we can, we're now, now we're in a situation where, you know, the poor are more likely to be overweight than underweight. you know this is an enormous enormous boom to civilization finance plays a functioning financial system plays a role in that that people don't naturally don't come out of the womb understanding and if you don't really learn it in school you're not going to same with middlemen right people that don't actually make the things they buy them from one person and then sell them to another that plays a crucial role in economies right But it's a role that people don't necessarily understand.

49:09Coleman Hughes:It's a role that's easily misunderstood as exploitative. Oh, you're just hiking up the price? You're just basically making things arbitrarily expensive? Well, no. There's a—every time—and so what Sowell shows is that every time societies around the world misunderstand that role and end up expelling ethnic groups that specialize in that role, the economy tends to suffer as a result. Yep. And it's not unique to Jews. That's actually the crucial insight of that essay, is that Jews happen to play this role for many reasons of historical accident in Europe. But if you look in Africa, the Lebanese have played that role in West Africa.

49:52Coleman Hughes:The Indians and Pakistanis played that role in East Africa and Uganda. And they were actually expelled using basically all the same arguments that like Hitler and Nazis used. If you look at that, you know, the famous propaganda video, The Eternal Jew, it's like the same exact arguments were said by the indigenous Africans about the Indians. Yep. And they expelled them in the 1970s or whatever it was. And so this is a common phenomenon in human psychology. It just happens, the Jews happen to be the most salient example of who it's been done to. And a big reason, You can see that very much in sort of third world socialism, which tries to destroy that commercial middle ground.

50:46Often, Nasser expelled the Greeks from Egypt. There's a lot of that going on. Then when those people are gone, you've got to somehow by state stores and state planning, you try to replace the work of that commercial class. And you find it really sucks and that nobody has anything and everything works badly. And then you start getting corruption and so on coming in to fill the void, essentially. And so, but what that has meant is that that's been one of the ways, I think, in which the path for anti-Semitism has been prepared in a lot of, you know, global South socialist and quasi-socialist thinking because the anti-middleman campaign becomes so ingrained into their theory and their practice.

51:45And then obviously when things don't work out, well, whose fault is that? It's the Jews. They're not here anymore, but they're obviously still causing our problems because it couldn't be that we have caused our problems. That can't be true. I think another factor which does help explain the kind of globalization of anti-Israel and anti-Semitic feeling is the notion of illegitimate immigration. that when your country was under, say, the British Empire, say if you're modern Malaysia, when the British were ruling what is now Malaysia, lots of Chinese immigrants came into Malaysia either to work on plantations for the British or commercially or whatever.

52:38And the Malay population hated this. A lot of the native Malay population hated and resented it. And so after independence, the sort of, you know, the fissure between the Malay indigenous people and the Chinese, the illegitimate, as people would say, Chinese immigrants. We never consented, said the Malays. This was the imperial overlords who did it. And so Malaysia today is a real hotbed of pro-Palestinian feeling because they see the Palestinian experience of the Jews allowing, of the British allowing Jewish immigration when Palestine was part of the British Empire is exactly what happened to them.

53:25And we can see that this is a factor in many different countries, ways in which the Israeli-Palestinian conflict echoes their own experience with the West or with colonization. And so you get kind of a mix of—

53:44Coleman Hughes:Ireland would be another example there, right? Yeah, exactly. Exactly right. The Irish feelings about Northern Ireland, and Ireland is now a very anti-Israel, certainly has a very anti-Israel government. I won't say that it's an anti-Israel country. That's another question. So you definitely have, and I think you can see in the U.S. today where there are a lot of people who feel that illegal migration under, as they would say, under the Biden administration or whatever, this deep resentment toward immigrants whose presence in your mind you've never consented to is a really important driving force in politics.

54:26And I think it may even explain some of the anti-Semitism on the far right today, and in American history in general, at times when immigration levels have been unusually high, and therefore anti-immigrant feeling is unusually high, anti-Semitism tends to flare at those times as well.

54:52Coleman Hughes:okay i want to i want to ask you in general terms about uh the america first movement and philosophy right now um what what are your feelings about whether america should project power abroad and if so what our priorities should be um and how do you view the america first feeling that is represented sort of by J.D. Vance, Nick Fuentes. You don't have to deal with the anti-Semitism bit because we've talked, I think, enough about that. But the sense that we just should not be that involved in the world. We're spending$60 to$100 billion on these military bases all around the world, and we could be spending that at home and so forth.

55:43Coleman Hughes:What are your views on that? Yeah, I guess... It's complicated, but life is complicated. Because I think on the one hand, if we look back, particularly since the end of the Cold War, the globalist agenda as a lot of it's been portrayed and a lot of people in power have bought into it, there's a wide gap between that and what a lot of Americans think our policy should be. So, you know, should people on the right might say, well, really, like, how much should the United States be pushing gay rights in Uganda? Or people in the blue collar movements, they should be offering tax deductions to American companies who relocate to China and both build up a strong competitor and, you know, put American workers out of business?

56:39Should we really be doing that? And I think there are ways in which I think you have to be America first if you want to be a leader of this country. I don't think you can get elected on an America second or America third or America fifth platform. And so whatever your views on American international engagements abroad, they have to be grounded and clearly grounded in a sensible, common sense understanding of what American security and what American economic interests. And by that, I mean the economic interests and the security of the American people, not some sort of hypothetical elite or something like that.

57:24And we do have to start from that position. And so to that extent, and I think some of the folks who particularly are in the democracy promotion business really got way ahead of their skis, leaned very far over their skis. I don't think America is actually very good at promoting democracy hither and thither around the world. People say, well, what about Germany and Japan? I say, yeah, well, step one is to destroy every city practically in those countries. And then step two, for the next five years, you control exactly how much they can eat every day. And you take physical control of those countries and you rule them.

58:11Okay, that's step one. How many countries are we willing to do that in or able to do that in today? So I think the globalist agenda needs to be ratcheted back a bit and made to resonate more with common sense. But I think you can you then so that far I'd say, hey, I'm America first, too. But I think you can go you can go you can fall off the other side of the fence and you can you can go from saying, OK, gay rights promotion of gay rights in Uganda or land distribution in, I don't know, Botswana is is a step too far. for the United States. Okay. But then you can also go the other way and say, nothing that happens in the Middle East or in Europe matters one way or the other to the United States.

59:12Right. And that I think is equally extreme in the other direction. In fact, it is, let's just take, you know, the Middle East, for example. I think we've all seen from the effects of the war with Iran, that if shipping closes down in the Gulf of Hormuz, in the Straits of Hormuz, in the Persian Gulf, the effects on the global economy and therefore on the American economy are enormous. Every time you go to the gas station, you say, maybe I do have some interests in the Middle East. Every time we're going to see more, you know, if stock markets tank, your retirement account is tanking, your company is laying off people because your customers in Europe or elsewhere don't have enough money.

59:58The health of the world economy is connected in very direct ways to the health of the American economy. Now, I'm not saying from that that all of our Middle East policies are smart or advance the national interest. That's a completely different debate and a very healthy one. But the idea that what happens in the Gulf stays in the Gulf, I just don't think makes sense. And I would also say when I look at, say, Taiwan or East Asia, which is another place where some people say, what's the American interest there? Why do we care about Taiwan? would say that when I go to Japan and talk to people there, what I hear is that if China were to take over Taiwan, Japan would have no choice but to kind of make a deal with China.

1:00:57That China would basically control most of the sea routes that Japan needs for trade with Europe and its access to oil and so on and so forth. And if Japan, with its financial and technological abilities, and South Korea would even more have to do that, from sort of the American alliance system into a new Chinese system, and you throw in the chip production and so on from Taiwan and the economic weight of that, I think you see a change in the world that really matters, again, not sort of abstractly to some idea of American power, but to the safety and the security and the prosperity of the average American family.

1:01:47Coleman Hughes:Okay, Walter Russell Mead, thanks so much for coming on my show. Great to be here. Hope to see you again soon. now finding a doctor is a little less challenging united health group is investing in tools that make it easier for patients to navigate health care and pay less these transparency tools help patients find providers and this is the big thing compare costs up front the big picture more transparent pricing benefits everyone and these tools from united health group can help patients save hundreds of dollars annually. Learn more at unitedhealthgroup.com slash commitment.