A new front group preaches restraint while
embracing interventionism
Numerous so-called “front groups”
operate in the United States. A front group is very simply an organization that
pretends to have a certain program while at the same time using that identity
as cover to promote a hidden agenda that is something quite different, often
opposed to what is being said publicly. The Global Climate Coalition is, for example, an
organization funded by fossil fuel providers that works to deny climate change
and other related issues. The Groundwater Protection Council does not protect
water resources at all and instead receives its money from the fracking
industry, which resists any regulation of water pollution it causes. The
Partnership for a New American Economy has nothing to do with protecting the
U.S. economy and instead seeks to replace American workers with H1B immigrant
laborers. Even the benign sounding National Sleep Foundation, is in reality a
Big Pharma creation intended to convince Americans that they need to regularly
use sleep inducing drugs.
Front
groups in a political context can be particularly dangerous as they deceive the
voter into supporting candidates or promoting policies that have a hidden
agenda. The Washington-based Foundation for Defense of Democracies, is, for
example, uninterested in preserving democracies unless that democracy is
Israel, which many observers would prefer to describe as an apartheid state. It
is funded by Zionists billionaires and its leadership meets regularly with
Israeli officials. The American Enterprise Institute is likewise a neocon
mouthpiece for economic imperialism and regime change disguising itself as a
free market advocate and the Brookings Institution is its liberal
interventionist counterpart.
Front
groups are sometimes largely fictional, on occasion creations of an
intelligence agency to give the impression that there exists in a country a
formidable opposition to policies pursued by the governing regime. Recent
developments in Venezuela and Bolivia rather suggest the CIA creation of front
groups in both countries while the Ukrainian regime change that took place in
2014 also benefited greatly from a U.S. created and supported opposition to the
legitimate Viktor Yanukovych government.
Both
the Russian Revolution that produced a communist state and the rise of fascism
in Europe also relied on front groups to send out socially and politically
acceptable messages while at the same time secretly working to install
totalitarian regimes with extreme policies. American front groups are not yet
so ambitious, but there are a number of them that do seek a sea change in U.S.
economic policies and foreign relations, to include Americans for Prosperity
funded by Charles Koch and George Soros’s Open Society Foundations.
Soros
and Koch come together in funding the recently launched Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft,
with the stated intention of “mov[ing] U.S. foreign policy away from endless
war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace.” The
Institute is named after the sixth U.S. President John Quincy Adams, who
famously made a speech while Secretary of State in which he cautioned that
while the United States of America would always be sympathetic to the attempts of
other countries to fight against dominance by the imperial European powers,
“she goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.” Quincy has a projected
annual budget of $5-6 million, enough to employ twenty or more staffers.
In
reality, though Quincy claims to be dedicated to “realism and restraint” and
“the pursuit of international peace” in foreign and national security policy,
it actually acts more like a vehicle for status quo interventionism as
practiced by the Bush, Obama and Trump administrations. The organization
particularly targets moderates and conservatives who have become disgruntled
with America’s wars, though it promotes itself as bringing together both the
left and the right to adopt a rational and less aggressive foreign policy.
The
Quincy Institute claims correctly that many of the other organizations dealing
with national security and international affairs inside the Beltway are either
humanitarian agenda-driven or neoconservative dominated, often meaning that
they in practice support serial interventionism, sometimes including broad
tolerance or even encouragement of war as a first option when dealing with
adversaries. These are policies that are currently playing out unsuccessfully
vis-à-vis Venezuela, Iran, Syria and North Korea.
The
Quincies promise to be different in an attempt to change the Washington foreign
policy consensus, which some have referred to as the Blob, and they have indeed
collected a very respectable group of genuine “realist” experts and thoughtful
pundits, including Professor Andrew Bacevich, National Iranian American Council
founder Trita Parsi and investigative journalist Jim Lobe. But, of course, he
who pays the piper calls the tune and the influence of globalists Koch and
Soros is clearly evident in terms of what is and what is not acceptable.
Both
George Soros and Charles Koch are globalist oligarchs, who have made hundreds
of millions if not billions of dollars by expanding their own supra-national
roles in a world where moneyed elites can act without any accountability.
Daniel McAdams of the Ron Paul Institute has described it as a “World of Davos
with fangs.” Soros in particular is notorious for his sometimes disastrous
support of so-called humanitarian “regime change” intervention to expand
“democracy movements” as part his vision of a liberal world order. In an op-ed
in the Financial Times on March 4th,
he urged that “Europe must stand with Turkey over Putin’s war crimes in Syria,”
an astonishing misreading of the situation in the region as Turkey is the
aggressor while Russia is fighting to eliminate the last major terrorist
enclave in Idlib. Soros is almost certainly the driving force behind one of the
four major projects planned by the Quincy Institute, headed by investigative
journalist Eli Clifton, which is called “Democratizing Foreign Policy.”
And
the Quincy President Andrew Bacevich has clearly indicated that there will
be red lines, that the institute won’t focus on “highlighting pro-Israel
organizations or donors.” In other words, it will not criticize Israel or its
Lobby as a driving element in America’s interventionist foreign policy. He
elaborated “Our purpose is to promote restraint as a central principle of U.S.
foreign policy—fewer wars and more effective diplomatic engagement.” In recent
articles on the Middle East and the upcoming national election, Bacevich has
been as good as his word, citing an enemies list that includes Russia, China,
Iran and Saudi Arabia while deliberately avoiding any mention of Israel, the
country that more than any other interferes in U.S. politics.
Quincy launched back in December but
its first major event took place on
February 26th, when it co-hosted with Foreign Policy Magazine a
series of individual presentations and panel discussions described as “A New
Vision for America in the World.” The featured speaker was none other than
David Petraeus, the former general who, the architect of the ill-fated surge,
never saw any real combat but oversaw the killing of thousands of Iraqis in
Fallujah. He was also for a short time a CIA Director who was in part
responsible for the American hand in undermining Syria and completing the
destruction of Libya. He had to resign from CIA after sharing classified
information with his mistress so she could write a book praising him. He now
works for Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P., a
New York investment firm as chairman of the firm’s KKR Global Institute, even
though he has no experience in either investment or banking.
Petraeus
was surely paid a large honorarium to appear at the Quincy event but no one is
admitting how much. He spoke for 20 minutes supporting America’s leadership
role in the world in advancing the “liberal world order” and left without
taking any questions from the audience.
Subsequent
speakers came from the German Marshall Fund, the New America Foundation, the
neocon Hudson Institute, the Brookings Institution and the Center for New
American Security. All those organizations are either liberal/humanitarian or
regime change interventionist inclined. One might observe that as neocon and
democracy promotion organizations all across the political spectrum never
provide a platform for critics, why is a group allegedly advocating “realism
and restraint” including the interventionist speakers as participants? Can it
be because the actual Quincy agenda is really more status quo than it pretends
to be to keep the Benjamins flowing?
Independent
award-winning journalist Gareth Porter attended the entire meeting and observed “the conference,
moreover, had a tenor and pace reminiscent of many dozens of Washington think
tank events on national security policy attended by this writer for years
before giving them up a few years ago. That’s because it consisted of brief and
almost always polite exchanges between advocates of new policies and
representatives of centrist think tanks that are deeply enmeshed in those
policies and the institutional interests underlying them.” He suggested that if
Quincy really wanted to succeed it would need to go “…beyond ‘realism and
restraint’ and talk[] about the need for fundamental change in the system of
national security institutions themselves. Of course, taking that lesson on
board might not be in line with the thinking of major funders.”
So, Quincy Institute
emerges as just another front group, well-funded and staffed by oligarchs with
their own agendas to pretend to be saying something new while really delivering
a quite different message, one more appreciated by the status quo. It is ever
so in Washington where money talks and establishment interests almost always
prevail both among Democrats and Republicans. For a brief moment it seemed that
electing Donald Trump might break that pattern, but the reality is that the
interests of the money masters who rule the United States as well as much of
the rest of the world are much more powerful than any number of Quincy
Institutes or American presidents.
Philip M. Giraldi, Ph.D., is
Executive Director of the Council for the National Interest, a 501(c)3 tax
deductible educational foundation (Federal ID Number #52-1739023) that seeks a
more interests-based U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East. Website is councilforthenationalinterest.org, address is P.O. Box 2157,
Purcellville VA 20134 and its email is inform@cnionline.org.