There’s a
new “anti-war” think tank coming to town. It will promote a new US foreign
policy — one based on diplomacy instead of sanctions and war. Sounds great, until you hear it's
being funded by Soros and Koch.
The
‘Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft’ will oppose Washington’s “endless
wars” and will “challenge the basis of American foreign policy
in a way that has not been done in at least the last quarter-century,” according
to co-founder Trita Parsi.
With
financier George Soros coming from the left (though he’s hardly a real leftist)
and industrialist Charles Koch coming from the right, everyone is
supposed to applaud the bipartisan nature of the initiative. The Boston Globe
called it “one of the most remarkable partnerships in modern American
political history” as though the two billionaire businessmen come from
alternate universes.
The Globe
notes that promoting an anti-war message is “radical notion,” given
that nearly every major think tank in Washington currently promotes “some
variant of neocon militarism or liberal interventionism.”
To give credit where it’s due, this really is a radical notion —
and the more the anti-war narrative begins to trickle into the mainstream, the
better. If the Quincy Institute does what it says on the tin, most genuine
anti-war activists and readers won’t quibble too much about where the think
tank got its start-up cash. Soros and Koch have thrown $500,000 each into the
pot.
Named
after John Quincy Adams, who declared in 1821 that the US “goes not
abroad in search of monsters to destroy"but is the “well-wisher
to the freedom and independence of all” and the “champion and
vindicator only of her own,” the think tank will offer a platform to
both progressive voices and anti-interventionist conservatives.
The Globe
writes that this will mean its writers will "likely" advocate
for things like pulling US troops out of Afghanistan and Syria, putting an end
to regime change wars and “less confrontational” policies
toward China and Russia.
The problem here is not the
concept. It’s just a question of whether or not the venture can actually be
taken seriously when Soros and Koch’s fingerprints are already all over the
world’s current endless wars, conflicts and regime changes.
Take some
well-known Soros-funded think tanks; the Center for American Progress and the
Atlantic Council, for example. They haven’t exactly been the biggest
peace-pushers in the think tank world. The AC also received funding from a slew
of arms manufacturers, so you’d be hard-pressed to find any anti-war sentiment
there. Soros has also been linked to the "pro-democracy" European
group Avaaz, which has advocated for no-fly zones in Libya and agitated for
regime change in Venezuela and Iran.
In 2017,
the Soros-funded ‘European Values’ think tank smeared 2,327 people as "useful
idiots" for Russia for merely appearing on RT, in a
McCarthyist-style attack on anyone deemed not to be sufficiently compliant with
prevailing Western narratives.
Koch too
has been linked to havoc-wreaking policies everywhere from Iraq to Venezuela.
Despite supposedly opposing the Iraq war, independent journalist Caitlin
Johnstone notes that Koch has been a major donor to the neoconservative American
Enterprise Institute, whose members are considered leading architects of the
invasion.
The Quincy Institute is slated to launch in September and until it
gets off the ground, it will be impossible to declare a final judgement on its
work — but given that
organizations funded by Soros and Koch have spouted war-promoting propaganda to
serve the US imperialist agenda for years, it’s a little difficult to see this
sudden change of heart as entirely genuine.
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The statements, views and opinions expressed in this column are
solely those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of RT.