A lot of Americans still think we live in Barbie's world, but in fact these days we're on planet Oppenheimer.

And while the Biden administration is, I think, beginning to respond to some of these crises it is doing so by sort of making

a lot of pledges and commitments that I'm not sure that the American people as a whole understand or are ready to back up. Throughout modern history there have been countless major wars that were triggered by fits of inattention or

inadvertence. In retrospect these moments can seem obvious sometimes even

linear but in the moment as these events are occurring, are there signs that

war is about to follow? Walter Russell Mead, who's been on this podcast a

couple times before,

the Global View columnist for the Wall Street Journal,

has been observing some of what he sees as these very fits of inattention right now,

this summer.

Walter thinks there's some kind of collective denial about these

flare-ups and what they could mean for the United States and how he believes they

could possibly land the US military in the middle of a major power conflict.

He's coined the term geopolitical climate denialism, meaning the environment around us is

chock full of flash points or potential flash points that could lead to

war and we are not paying attention that's why we ask them to join us today

Walter's also just back from another trip to India. He's been spending a lot of time in India

and has a lot of insights on the growing importance of India to America, which are fresh,

as is his analysis of the changing relationship between the United States and Saudi Arabia,

or at least the changing relationship between the beginning of the Biden administration and

where the Biden administration is now, potentially, at some some stage of trying to

orchestrate a normalization arrangement between the state of Israel and the

...