Dedicated experiments in the DIII-D tokamak J. L. Luxon, Nucl. Fusion, 42 , 614 2002, the Joint European Torus JET P. H. Rebut, R. J. Bickerton, and B. E. Keen, Nucl. Fusion 25 , 1011 1985, and the National Spherical Torus Experiment NSTX M. Ono, S. M. Kaye, Y.-K. M. Peng et al. , Nucl. Fusion 40 , 557 2000 reveal the commonalities of resistive wall mode RWM stabilization by sufficiently fast toroidal plasma rotation in devices of different size and aspect ratio. In each device the weakly damped n =1 RWM manifests itself by resonant field amplification RFA of externally applied n =1 magnetic fields, which increases with the plasma pressure. Probing DIII-D and JET plasmas with similar ideal magnetohydrodynamic MHD stability properties with externally applied magnetic n =1 fields, shows that the resulting RFA is independent of the machine size. In each device the drag resulting from RFA slows the toroidal plasma rotation and can lead to the onset of an unstable RWM. The critical plasma rotation required for stable operation in the plasma center decreases with increasing q 95 , which is explained by the inward shift of q surfaces where the critical rotation remains constant. The quantitative agreement of the critical rotation normalized to the inverse Alfvén time at the q =2 surface in similar DIII-D and JET plasmas supports the independence of the RWM stabilization mechanism of machine size and indicates the importance of the q =2 surface. At low aspect ratio the required fraction of the Alfvén velocity increases significantly. The ratio of the critical rotation in similar NSTX and DIII-D plasmas can be explained by trapped particles not contributing to the RWM stabilization, which is consistent with stabilization mechanisms that are based on ion Landau damping. Alternatively, the ratio of the required rotation to the sound wave velocity remains independent of aspect ratio.