With less than a year before the presidential elections in the United States, a new clash between Joe Biden and Donald Trump is almost certain. For international relations expert Walter Russell Meade, the US has never had two candidates so unpopular, and that this is fertile ground for the sppread of conspiracy theories – with anti-Semitism the most popular of these.

Walter Russell Meade was at FLAD on November 28, for the session ‘The Return of Geopolitics and the Democratic Agenda‘, part of the Democracy: The Way Ahead cycle, promoted by FLAD. This conversation was moderated by Raquel Vaz Pinto, Researcher at the Portuguese Institute of International Relations of the NOVA University of Lisbon and Professor at the Faculty of Social Sciences and Humanities of the same University. See it in full here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwOKKHQVrK8ab_channel=Funda%C3%A7%C3%A3oLuso-AmericanparaoDesenvolvimento

Walter Russell Mead, is a Fellow of the Hudson Institute, Professor at Bard College and international affairs columnist for the Wall Street Journal. He was a fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations between 1997 and 2010, he is the author of several books on United States foreign policy, the most recent of which, published in 2022, The Arc of A Covenant: The United States, Israel, and the Fate of the Jewish People (Alfred A. Knopf, 2022), makes an in-depth analysis of the relationship between the United States and Israel, of its impact on the foreign policy of the United States, of the Zionist movement and of the founding of the State of Israel.

Democracy: The Way Ahead is an initiative of FLAD that aims to promote a space for reflection and debate on the current problems facing the Euro-Atlantic community, and, using international experts, seek solutions for the coming decades.

As part of this cycle, FLAD received John Ikenberry, Professor at Princeton University, and Constanze Stelzenmüller, director of the Center on the United States and Europe at the Brookings Institution, journalists Peter Baker (New York Times) and Susan Glasser (New Yorker), and international relations expert Robert Kaplan.