Walter Russell Mead
Wall Street Journal Global View columnist · Author of Special Providence and God and Gold
aka Mead
“I talked to people who said that they don't treat bullet wounds anymore. It's all drones. The Ukraine war is no longer a battalion over here shooting at a battalion over there. With these drones you have this sort of gray kill zone... They told me they had one soldier, that it took them 63 days to get them evacuated after a wound.”
“They're trying to get themselves into a position where they could have a soft blockade. They could give the orders that any ship that wants to go to Taiwan first has to stop at a Chinese port and go through a customs clearing process to assert sovereignty... The Japanese would see Chinese control of Taiwan as a direct threat to Japanese independence... they're raising their defense spending, they're rethinking their doctrine.”
“One of the real facts in the Strait is it's not even as important that Iran can hit a tanker with a drone as it is that Iran could put some drones on some desalinization plants and make the cities of the Gulf essentially uninhabitable.”
Walter Russell Mead
One-line summary: WSJ Global View columnist; tracked for practitioner color on drone warfare, a Taiwan soft-blockade path, and Hormuz deterrence — attach on existing MP / Taiwan chains, not a new ticker thesis.
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Speaker-attributed claims extracted from diarized sources. Each bullet mirrors one entry in quotes: frontmatter — keep them in sync.
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On drone-warfare-demand-to-mp-hree-rerate, taiwan-chokepoint-to-allied-reshoring:
"I talked to people who said that they don't treat bullet wounds anymore. It's all drones. The Ukraine war is no longer a battalion over here shooting at a battalion over there. With these drones you have this sort of gray kill zone... They told me they had one soldier, that it took them 63 days to get them evacuated after a wound." — 2026-09-08-podcast-invest-like-the-best-walter-russell-mead-how-america-keeps-winning (2026-09-08)
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On taiwan-chokepoint-to-allied-reshoring:
"They're trying to get themselves into a position where they could have a soft blockade. They could give the orders that any ship that wants to go to Taiwan first has to stop at a Chinese port and go through a customs clearing process to assert sovereignty... The Japanese would see Chinese control of Taiwan as a direct threat to Japanese independence... they're raising their defense spending, they're rethinking their doctrine." — 2026-09-08-podcast-invest-like-the-best-walter-russell-mead-how-america-keeps-winning (2026-09-08)
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On drone-warfare-demand-to-mp-hree-rerate:
"One of the real facts in the Strait is it's not even as important that Iran can hit a tanker with a drone as it is that Iran could put some drones on some desalinization plants and make the cities of the Gulf essentially uninhabitable." — 2026-09-08-podcast-invest-like-the-best-walter-russell-mead-how-america-keeps-winning (2026-09-08)