So who exactly is Walter Mead?

If you were in policy debate at any time in your life, there's a good chance you know the short string of words that have made him famous amongst the forensics nerdery known by all as "the Mead card":

But what if it can't? What if the global economy stagnates -- or even shrinks? In that case, we will face a new period of international conflict: South against North, rich against poor. Russia, China, India -- these countries with their billions of people and their nuclear weapons will pose a much greater danger to the world than Germany and Japan did in the 30s.

Mead, New Perspectives Quarterly, Summer 1992.

No econ DA impact is complete without Walter Russell Mead. Didn't know this until I looked him up after a conversation with my old debate partner Joey, but Mead is actually a respected senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a foreign policy scholar in the tradition of Joseph Nye. Yet amongst young intellectuals, he will always be remembered as the person who could put global nuclear holocaust together with economic decline in the fewest number of words possible.