Greetings, TAI readers and other visitors. My name is Walter Russell Mead; I’m on the editorial board at TAI and Adam Garfinkle and the editorial team have courageously and graciously offered me a platform from which to blog.

This is not, quite, my first date with the internet. For the last few weeks I have participated in The Arena on Politico.com. Before that experience, I was worried that I might find posting several times a week too much of a distraction, or that I might run out of things to say.

That hasn’t happened yet. Opinions are like love, it turns out; the more you give away, the more you have.

I will keep posting on Politico, and readers here can follow my slow ascent up the technological learning curve by noting how long it takes for me to figure out how to include links to those posts here.

But this blog here at The American Interest will be my main cyber-squeeze. If it lives, it will change; as I learn about the form and as you, dear reader, respond, I hope we will create something interesting and new.

I go into this with the idea that even though I am about the three hundred millionth person on Planet Earth to start up a blog, the genre is still adolescent. The world is still learning what it wants from blogs, and bloggers are still testing the possibilities of the new format. Gazettes and coffeeshop newsletters had been around for a while before Addison and Steele developed the informal personal essay they deployed so brilliantly in The Spectator.

Don’t worry; I’m not writing this with stars in my eyes. As President Obama seems to be discovering, starting a new venture by vaingloriously comparing yourself to the Great Masters of Old is a bad idea. The president would be having a much better fall if he hadn’t encouraged people last winter to compare him to Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt; my little blog will probably work better if I don’t start by inviting comparisons to Goethe and Henry Adams.

Not that I’m trying to pile on Obama. The reports of his demise are as exaggerated as last winter’s naïve and gushing consensus that he was ready to pose for Mt. Rushmore. He’s making some rookie mistakes and some of them have already cost him dear, but it will take more than that to finish him off. Lincoln went to Washington with a lot of illusions; during his ordeal in the White House he was brutally knocked around and the man who went to Richmond in 1865 was a very different man from the railroad lawyer who skulked into town in 1861. The question for Obama, as for so many others in the White House, will be how does he respond to setbacks and adversity? Will he learn and grow, testing his old convictions under fire and carrying the country with him on the path he gradually comes to discern, or will the chaos of events get the better of him? He is the only president we’ve got and while no doubt I will have a few criticisms to make here and there I will be rooting for him every step of the way.

Anyway, this is going to be a writer’s blog, not a literary classic. I’ll blog about what interests me: books, politics domestic and foreign, ideas, people, events, the march of history and the meaning of life. I’ll keep an eye on what my friends and colleagues are saying on TAI and elsewhere; from time to time I’ll respond. I’ll try to keep a civil tongue in my head (or civil fingertips on my keyboard?) but can’t promise that I’ll always succeed. I will tell the truth as I see it as best I can.

I will also check the comments; please let me know what you think — nicely, if possible. And if anybody out there has a good name for a new blog, please tell. I’ve been wracking my brains for a name for this thing, so far without success.