Those hoping the non-interventionist cause
would be given some real muscle if a couple of oligarchs who’ve made fortunes from global interventionism team
up and pump millions into Washington think tanks will be sorely disappointed by
the train wreck that is the Koch/Soros alliance.
The result thus far has not been a tectonic
shift in favor of a new direction, with new faces and new ideas, but rather an
opportunity for these same old Washington think tanks, now flush with even more
money, to re-brand their pet interventionisms as “restraint.”
The
flagship of this new alliance, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft,
was sold as an earth-shattering breakthrough – an “odd couple” of “left-wing”
Soros and “right-wing” Koch boldly tossing differences aside to join together
and “end the endless wars.”
That
organization is now up and running and it isn’t pretty.
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To begin with, the whole premise is
deeply flawed. George Soros is no “left-winger” and Koch is no “right-winger.” It’s
false marketing, like the claim that drinking Diet Coke will make you skinny.
Both are globalist oligarchs who continue to invest hundreds of millions of dollars to
create the kind of world where the elites govern with no accountability except
to themselves, and “the interagency,” rather than an elected
President of the US, makes US foreign policy.
As
libertarian intellectual Tom Woods once famously quipped, “No matter whom you vote for, you
always wind up getting John McCain.” That is exactly the world
Koch and Soros want. It’s a world of Davos with fangs, not Mainstreet, USA.
A
‘New Vision’?
Anyone
doubting that Quincy is just a mass re-branding effort for the same failed
foreign policies of the past two decades need look no further than that
organization’s first big public event, a February 26th conference with Foreign
Policy Magazine, to explore “A New Vision for America in the World.”
Like
pouring old wine into new bottles, this “new vision” is being presented by the
very same people and institutions who gave us the “old vision” – you know, the
one they pretend to oppose.
How
should anyone interested in restraining foreign policy – let alone actual
non-interventionism – react to the kick-off presentation of the Quincy
Institute’s conference, “Perspective on U.S. Global Leadership in the 21st
Century,” going to disgraced US General David Petraeus?
Petraeus
is, among many other things, an architect of the disastrous and failed “surge”
policy in Iraq. He is still convinced (at least as of a few years ago) that “we won” in Iraq…but that we dare not end the
occupation lest we lose what we “won.” How’s that for “restraint”?
While
head of the CIA, he teamed up with then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to
develop and push the brilliant idea of directly and overtly training and
equipping al-Qaeda and other jihadists to overthrow the secular government of
Bashar Assad. How’s that for “restraint”?
When
a tape leaked of Fox News contributor
Kathleen T. McFarland meeting with Petraeus at the behest of then-Fox
Chairman Roger Ailes to convince him to run for US president, Petraeus
told her that the CIA in his view is “a national asset…a treasure.” He then
went on to speak favorably of the CIA’s role in Libya.
But
the absurdity of leading the conference with such an unreconstructed
warmongering interventionist is only the beginning of the trip down the Quincy
conference rabbit hole.
Rogues’ Gallery of Washington’s Worst
Shortly
following the disgraced general is a senior official from the German
Marshal Fund, Julianne Smith, to give us “A New Vision for
America’s Role in the World.” Her organization, readers will recall, is
responsible for some of the most egregious warmongering propaganda.
The
German Marshal Fund launched and funds the Alliance
for Securing Democracy, an organization led by such notable
proponents of “restraint” as neoconservative icon William Kristol, John McCain
Institute head David Kramer, Michael “Trump is an agent of Putin” Morell, and, among
others, the guy who made millions out of scaring the hell out of Americans,
former Homeland-Security-chief-turned-airport-scanner-salesman Michael
Chertoff.
The Alliance
for Securing Democracy was responsible for the discredited “Hamilton 68
Dashboard,” a magic tool they claimed would seek and destroy “Russian bots” in
the social media. After the propaganda value of such a farce had been reaped,
Alliance fellow Clint Watts admitted the whole thing was bogus.
Moving
along, so as not to cherry pick the atrocities in this conference, moderating
the section on the Middle East is one “scholar,” Mehdi Hasan, who
actually sent a letter to Facebook demanding that
the social media company censor more political speech! He has attacked what he
calls “free speech fundamentalists.”
Joining
the “Regional Spotlight: Asia-Pacific” is Patrick Cronin of the thoroughly
– and proudly – neoconservative Hudson
Institute. Cronin’s entire professional career consists of
position after position at the center of Washington’s various “regime change”
factories. From a directorial position at the mis-named US Institute for Peace to
“third-ranking position” at the US Agency for International Development to
“senior director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the [neoconservative] Center for a New
American Security.” This is a voice of “restraint”?
Later,
the segment on “Ending Endless War” features at least two speakers who
absolutely oppose the idea. Rosa Brooks, Senior Fellow at the
“liberal interventionist” New America Foundation, wrote not long ago that,
“There’s No Such Thing as Peacetime.” In the article she argued the benefits of
“abandon[ing] the effort to draw increasingly arbitrary lines between peacetime
and wartime and instead focus[ing] on developing institutions and norms capable
of protecting rights and rule-of-law values at all times.” In other words, war
is endless so man up and get used to it.
This
may be the key for how you end endless war. Just stop calling it “war.”
Brooks’
fellow panelist, Tom Wright, hails from the epicenter of liberal
interventionism, the Brookings Institution, where he is director of the “Center
on the United States and Europe.” Brookings loves “humanitarian interventions”
and has published pieces attempting to convince us that the attack on Libya was not a mistake.
Wright
himself is featured in the current edition of the Council on Foreign Relations’
publication Foreign Affairs arguing that old interventionist
shibboleth that the disaster in Iraq was not caused by the US invasion, but
rather by Obama’s withdrawal.
This
Quincy Institute champion of “restraint” concludes his latest piece arguing
that:
Now is not the time for a
revolution in U.S. strategy. The United States should continue to play a
leading role as a security provider in global affairs.
How
revolutionary!
The
moderator of that final panel in the upcoming Quincy Institute first conference
is Loren DeJonge Schulman, a deputy director at the above-named
Center for a New American Security. Before joining that neoconservative think
tank, Schulman served as Senior Advisor to National Security Advisor Susan
Rice! Among her other international crimes, readers will recall that Rice was
a chief architect of the US attack on
Libya.
Schulman’s entire career is, again, in the service
of, alternatively, the war machine and the regime change machine.
The
Quincy Institute’s first big event, which it bills as a showcase for a new
foreign policy of “restraint,” is in fact just another gathering of Washington’s
usual warmongers, neocons, and “humanitarian” interventionists.
Quincy
has been received with gushing praise from people who should know better. Any
of those gushers who look at this first Quincy conference and continue to
maintain that a revolution in foreign policy is afoot are either lying to us or
lying to themselves.
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But
Wait…There’s More!
Sadly,
the fallout extends beyond just this particular new institute and this
particular event.
Those
who continue to push the claim that Koch and Soros are changing their spots and
now supporting restraint and non-interventionism should be made to explain why
the most egregiously warmongering and interventionist organizations are finding
themselves on the receiving end of oligarch largese.
Just
days ago a glowing article in Politico detailed the
recipients of millions of Koch dollars to promote “restraint.” Who is leading
the Koch brigades in the battle for a non-interventionist, “restrained” foreign
policy?
Politico
reveals:
Libertarian business tycoon
Charles Koch is handing out $10 million in new grants to promote voices of
military restraint at American think tanks, part of a growing effort by Koch to
change the U.S. foreign policy conversation.
The grants, details of which
were shared exclusively with POLITICO, are being split among four institutions:
the Atlantic Council; the Center for the National Interest;
the Chicago Council on Global Affairs; and the RAND Corporation.
The
Atlantic Council has been pushing
US foreign policy toward war with Russia for years, pumping
endless false propaganda and neocon lies to fuel the idea that Russia is
engaged in an “asymmetric battle” against the US, that the mess in Ukraine was
the result of a Russian out-of-the-blue invasion rather than an Obama
Administration coup d’etat, that Russia threw the
elections to Putin’s agent Trump, and that Moscow is seeking to to sap and
impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.
The
Atlantic Council’s “Disinfo Portal,” a self-described “one-stop
interactive online portal and guide to the Kremlin’s information war,” is raw,
overt war propaganda. It is precisely the kind of war propaganda that has
fueled three years of mass hysteria called “Russiagate,” which though proven
definitively to be an utter fraud, continues to animate most of Washington’s
thinking on the Left and Right to this day.
The
Atlantic Council, through something it calls a “Digital Forensic
Research Lab,” works with giant social media outlets to
identify and ban any independent or alternative news outlets who deviate from
the view that the US is besieged by enemies, from Syria to Iran to Russia to
China and beyond, and that therefore it must continue spending a trillion
dollars per year to maintain its role as the unipolar hyperpower. Thus, the
Atlantic Council – a US government funded entity – colludes
with social media to silence any deviation from US government approved foreign
policy positions.
And
these are the kinds of organizations that Koch and Soros claim are going to
save us from Washington’s interventionist foreign policy?
Equally
upsetting is the “collateral damage” that the Koch/Soros alliance and its love
child Quincy hath wrought. To see once-vibrant and reliably non-interventionist
upstarts like The American Conservative Magazine (TAC) lured away from the
vision of its founders, Pat Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos, to slip into the warm Hegelian embrace of
well-funded compromise is truly heartbreaking. It is to witness the soiling of
that once-brave publication’s vindication for being right about Iraq War 2.0
while virtually all of Washington was wrong.
Incidentally,
and to add insult to injury, it is precisely these kinds of Washington
institutions who most viciously attacked TAC in those days who now find
themselves trusted partners and even “expert” sources!
TAC!
Beware! It’s not too late to wake up and smell the deception!
How
to End Endless Wars (The Easy Way)
If a
Soros-Koch alliance was actually interested in ending endless US wars and
re-orienting our currently hyper-interventionist foreign policy toward
“restraint,” it would simply announce that not another penny in campaign
contributions would go to any candidate for House, Senate, or President who did
not vow publicly in writing to vote against or veto any legislation that did
not reduce military spending, that imposed sanctions overseas, that threatened
governments overseas, that appropriated funds in secret or overtly to
destabilize or overthrow governments overseas, or that sent foreign “aid” to
any government overseas.
It
would cost pennies to make such an announcement and stick to it, and the result
would be a massive shift in the American body politic toward what the current
alliance advertises itself as promoting.
But
Koch/Soros don’t really want to end endless US interventions overseas. They
want to fund the same old think tanks who are responsible for the disaster that
is US foreign policy, re-brand interventionism as non-interventionism, and hope
none of us rubes in flyover country notices.
To
paraphrase what Pat Buchanan said about Democrats in his historic 1992
convention speech, the whitewashing of Washington’s most egregiously
interventionist institutions and experts as “restrained” non-interventionists
is “the greatest single exhibition of cross-dressing in American political
history.”
Daniel
McAdams is the Executive Director of the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and
Prosperity.
Copyright © 2020 by RonPaul Institute. Permission to reprint in
whole or in part is gladly granted, provided full credit and a live link are
given.
https://www.lewrockwell.com/2020/02/daniel-mcadams/the-koch-soros-quincy-project-a-train-wreck-of-neocon-and-humanitarian-interventionists/
