Traveling to various countries to speak about foreign policy during the George W. Bush administration, Walter Russell Mead encountered a single, widely held idea: that Jewish influence was the best way to explain U.S. conduct abroad. Yet both polling data and Mead’s own casual observations revealed that American Jews overwhelmingly disliked President Bush, making it highly unlikely he was doing their bidding. Then, when Barack Obama became president, Mead’s foreign interlocutors expressed their disappointment that Obama had not created more “daylight” between the U.S. and Israel—and concluded that “the Jews” must be holding him back. This assertion too failed to hold up to even mild scrutiny. Mead thus set out to discover the real reasons for the enduring American alliance with the Jewish state, resulting in his recent book The Arc of a Covenant, which he discusses with Michael Doran. (Audio, 66 minutes)
Read more on Counterbalance: https://www.hudson.org/research/18073-counterbalance-ep-45-the-arc-of-a-covenant