{"id":139144,"date":"2019-08-05T12:00:14","date_gmt":"2019-08-05T11:00:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=139144"},"modified":"2019-11-20T09:49:12","modified_gmt":"2019-11-20T09:49:12","slug":"can-a-new-think-tank-put-a-stop-to-endless-war","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2019\/08\/can-a-new-think-tank-put-a-stop-to-endless-war\/","title":{"rendered":"Can a New Think Tank Put a Stop to Endless War?"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Quincy Institute will attempt to radically rewrite the DC foreign policy playbook.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>30 Jul 2019 – <\/em>John Quincy Adams doesn\u2019t get a lot of respect. There are no monuments to the sixth president on the National Mall, his face adorns no paper currency, and history mainly remembers him for losing reelection to Andrew Jackson. But before Adams became president, he was an accomplished diplomat, representing the US government in multiple European capitals. On July 4, 1821, while serving as secretary of state, he gave a speech in which he declared that although the United States would always be sympathetic to national liberation struggles, \u201cshe goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.\u201d<\/p>\n

This early warning against an interventionist foreign policy has echoed into the present. Adams\u2019s middle name has been adopted by a newly formed think tank in Washington, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which states that its mission<\/a> is to \u201cmove US foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace.\u201d The group is still raising money, but with a projected second-year budget of $5 million to 6 million, enough to support 20 to 30 staffers, it aims to match the scale of more established think tanks and to disrupt the foreign policy consensus in Washington.<\/p>\n

The Quincy Institute\u2019s founders plan to attack that consensus on multiple fronts. That includes publishing op-eds and making TV appearances, writing white papers, hosting seminars and panels, and briefing policy-makers. Ultimately, it would mean creating a pipeline of young talent that can staff up congressional offices and in the future maybe even the White House, thus enabling advocates of noninterventionism to counter aggressive pushes for regime change in countries like Iran and Venezuela.<\/p>\n

As first reported<\/a> by Stephen Kinzer in The Boston Globe<\/em>, the Quincy Institute includes the unlikely duo of Charles Koch and George Soros among its founding donors\u2014each has committed half a million dollars\u2014and is intended to serve as a counterweight to the Blob, as the bipartisan national security establishment dedicated to endless war has come to be known.<\/p>\n

Related Article: <\/em><\/strong>The Transpartisan Revolt Against America\u2019s Endless Wars – <\/a>Katrina vanden Heuvel<\/em><\/strong><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Trita Parsi, Quincy\u2019s executive vice president and the founder of the National Iranian American Council<\/a>, says he\u2019s proud to have the support of both the Charles Koch Foundation and Soros\u2019s Open Society Foundations. To explain Quincy\u2019s ideological orientation, Parsi emphasizes \u201ctranspartisanship,\u201d which he distinguishes from the much-derided term \u201cbipartisanship.\u201d Bipartisanship, he says, is when \u201cyou have two sides, they disagree, and then they come to an agreement with some sort of a compromise that neither side is really happy with.\u201d Transpartisanship, on the other hand, means \u201cyou have two sides, they disagree on a whole bunch of issues, but they have overlapping views. Neither side compromises. They\u2019re just collaborating on issues they already are in agreement over.\u201d He argues that the Blob\u2019s status quo is maintained by the mainstream policy-makers in both parties who support military intervention and that challenging it will require an alliance of politicians on the left and right who agree on the need for restraint, even if they do so for different reasons.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Odd couple: George Soros, left, and Charles Koch, right, have each committed half a million dollars to the Quincy Institute. News Punch<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cWhat we want to see is something that is consonant with American tradition,\u201d says Stephen Wertheim, one of the institute\u2019s five cofounders (and, full disclosure, a friend). In other words, this is not an inherently radical project, even if it may be received as such by some in Washington. For instance, in response to Kinzer\u2019s article, neoconservative \u00e9minence grise and Iraq War architect Bill Kristol tweeted<\/a>, \u201c75 years of a US-led liberal international order, based on a US forward presence and backed by US might, with regional and bilateral alliances and relatively free trade, has enabled remarkable peace and prosperity. But let\u2019s go back to the 1920\u2019s and 30\u2019s!\u201d<\/p>\n

Eli Clifton, another cofounder, says he was encouraged by Kristol\u2019s attack. \u201cI welcome him being the face of the effort to criticize us. I think Bill Kristol\u2019s track record speaks for itself,\u201d he says. That record, which includes enthusiastic support for open-ended US military involvement in more than a dozen countries since 9\/11, isn\u2019t Kristol\u2019s alone; the most powerful figures in the Democratic and Republican parties are just as responsible, and with a handful of exceptions, few of them have shown any inclination to change course.<\/p>\n

Quincy\u2019s founding mandate is centered on two regional programs, the Middle East and East Asia (where the US has its most significant military commitments), though other areas could fall under its purview if its budget expands, and two additional programs: Ending Endless War, which will be run by Wertheim, and Democratizing Foreign Policy, which will be run by Clifton.<\/p>\n

Wertheim, a former academic historian, broadly belongs to the realist school of foreign policy, which sees sovereign powers as being motivated by rational interests and encourages stability in international relations. But his realism is not the cold-blooded realpolitik of Henry Kissinger; Wertheim identifies as progressive. \u201cForce ends human life, displaces people, devastates communities, and damages the environment,\u201d reads Quincy\u2019s statement of purpose. As Wertheim puts it, advocates of humanitarian interventionism tend to overlook how \u201cpushing these agendas can be used to create a prolonged conflict. And when that happens, we don\u2019t see human rights advance. Quite the opposite.\u201d This is a critique not only of neoconservatives like Kristol but also of liberal interventionists like Samantha Power, Barack Obama\u2019s UN ambassador, who see a responsibility to protect vulnerable communities by the use of military force as a core principle of US foreign policy.<\/p>\n

Clifton, meanwhile, is more focused on the Blob itself and on the way money is used to reinforce its pro-war consensus. His emphasis will be on domestic strategies for reducing interventionism\u2014from reasserting Congress\u2019s constitutional authority over the president\u2019s ability to make war to doing outreach to communities of color that are traditionally marginalized in Washington foreign policy debates. The Quincy founders believe that the existing foreign policy elite is out of step with the American public, which is far more skeptical of military adventurism, and they plan to invite underrepresented communities to participate in the institute\u2019s events and recruit people from nonelite backgrounds into the foreign policy profession. They are also interested in including military veterans; a recent Pew poll<\/a> shows large majorities of service members who did tours in Iraq or Afghanistan said they believe neither war was worth fighting.<\/p>\n

Clifton said his experience working for ThinkProgress<\/em>, a liberal website affiliated with the Democratic Party\u2013aligned Center for American Progress, showed him that \u201cthe supposed institutional Democratic Party\u2019s foreign policy space was very tightly constrained.\u201d While CAP has always maintained that its research is independent, Clifton speculates that the funding the organization received from the government of the United Arab Emirates may have created pressure to support status quo policies in the Middle East. In 2012, when Clifton and several of his colleagues came under fire from pro-Israel and conservative groups for writing critically about Israel and in support of diplomacy with Iran, CAP tried to restrict what they could write about, prompting his voluntary departure.<\/p>\n

When it comes to foreign policy, Clifton says, there\u2019s little difference between CAP and Republican-aligned think tanks like the American Enterprise Institute, the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, and the Hudson Institute. One way Quincy will distinguish itself from its better-established rivals will be to refuse money from foreign governments.<\/p>\n

\u201cThere\u2019s almost no progressive foreign policy infrastructure in Washington,\u201d says Matt Duss, Bernie Sanders\u2019s foreign policy adviser and a former colleague of Clifton\u2019s at ThinkProgress<\/em> who has been informally consulting with the Quincy founders. Duss says that the organization\u2019s launch is \u201cone of the most encouraging things to happen in the US foreign policy debate in a long time.\u201d<\/p>\n

He adds, \u201cYou have a number of groups\u2014such as the Center for Economic and Policy Research<\/a>, the Institute for Policy Studies<\/a>, the Center for International Policy<\/a>, a few others\u2014putting out good, progressive-oriented work and a coalition of advocacy organizations like Win Without War<\/a>, the Friends Committee on National Legislation<\/a>, and others who punch far above their weight\u2026but the amount of resources they\u2019re up against is pretty staggering.\u201d<\/p>\n

Keane Bhatt, a communications director for Sanders and a former policy director for the Congressional Progressive Caucus, says he hopes Quincy \u201ccan lend intellectual capacity\u201d to an alliance of progressive and conservative lawmakers who share noninterventionist principles. Besides his boss, Bhatt lists Democratic Representatives Tulsi Gabbard, Pramila Jayapal, Ro Khanna, and Mark Pocan; Republican Senators Mike Lee and Rand Paul and Representatives Ken Buck, Matt Gaetz, and Thomas Massie; and independent Representative Justin Amash.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Washington foreign policy consensus is badly broken and captured by a revolving door of corruption that keeps foreign policy elites in power despite the mistakes of the past and is fueled by arms dealers, special interests, and foreign governments,\u201d says Kate Kizer, the policy director of Win Without War. \u201cThe Quincy Institute has the chance to be a welcome breath of fresh air.\u201d<\/p>\n

So far, Quincy\u2019s soft launch \u201chas exceeded our expectations,\u201d Clifton says. \u201cWe\u2019re getting so many e-mails as well as positive responses on social media\u2014people saying, \u2018Hey, yeah, this is filling a gap.\u2019\u200a\u201d Even the more critical feedback has been energizing; in response to an article<\/a> in Foreign Policy<\/em> by James Traub, \u201cBillionaires Can\u2019t Buy World Peace,\u201d that labels the new organization a threat to American exceptionalism, Wertheim boasts, \u201cPeople are having to defend endless war. We have switched the terms of debate.\u201d<\/p>\n

At the same time, potential allies likely have a few initial concerns. The most obvious is the group\u2019s support from the Charles Koch Foundation, the mere mention of which is a red flag for progressives. Brothers Charles and David Koch, after all, are the leading bankrollers of conservative intellectual infrastructure in the US and have underwritten the Republican Party\u2019s dominance of Washington, the judiciary, and statehouses across the country.<\/p>\n

Parsi notes that the Kochs also fund groups like the Cato Institute that have advocated for diplomacy by, for instance, supporting the Obama administration\u2019s nuclear deal with Iran, which was strenuously opposed by the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, the powerful pro-Israel lobbying group, and by major figures in both parties. He argues that the Kochs have been better allies to the anti-war movement than many prominent Democratic institutions and donors. In some ways, the bigger surprise is that Soros, who has traditionally supported the Blob\u2019s hegemonic liberal world order, is also funding Quincy. \u201cThere clearly is a recognition among folks in Open Society that many of the past interventions have been unsuccessful, if not disastrous,\u201d says Parsi, whereas the Kochs are \u201ca little more decided on what they think is the right foreign policy and are only funding institutions geared to less military involvement.\u201d (This isn\u2019t quite true; the Kochs have also donated to the pro-war American Enterprise Institute as well as many Republican politicians who have hawkish foreign policy positions.)<\/p>\n

This isn\u2019t the first time one of the Koch brothers have worked with progressives to effect change. In recent years the aggressive carceral policies supported by both parties since the 1990s have been challenged by a coalition that includes left-leaning racial justice activists and libertarians supported by the Kochs. \u201cIf restraint in foreign policy can become like criminal justice reform, I think that would be a major step,\u201d says Wertheim. \u201cEven during an administration that ran on racist law and order tropes, we see criminal justice reform moving forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s important to recognize what Quincy is not: It is not a left-wing foreign policy institution, something that will remain scarce in Washington. Some of the boldest proposals coming from progressive candidates like Sanders and Elizabeth Warren\u2014for addressing climate change, reducing global poverty and inequality, and combating transnational corruption and money laundering\u2014are not Quincy\u2019s top priorities, even if some of the founders are sympathetic to such an agenda.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce we significantly reduce the military budget, we can argue about how to use the money,\u201d says Wertheim\u2014that is, whether the savings from a slashed Pentagon budget should be invested in social programs or used to pay for tax cuts for the wealthiest Americans.<\/p>\n

\u201cI would be concerned if there are strings attached to any funding,\u201d he adds. While Quincy\u2019s founders expect to hire an ideologically diverse staff, that isn\u2019t a condition imposed on it by the Charles Koch Foundation; rather, it\u2019s intended to make a transpartisan political strategy more effective. Wertheim acknowledges Quincy\u2019s narrow focus on the use of military force, but he attributes this to a desire to avoid overextension at the outset, suggesting that if the organization grows big enough, it can eventually expand its mandate to issues like climate change and human rights.<\/p>\n

Wertheim and the other founders do take the climate crisis seriously. \u201cMilitarism in US foreign policy contributes to climate change,\u201d he says, \u201cand impedes the international cooperation that will be needed to address it. Very few institutions confront this issue. The Quincy Institute will.\u201d He notes that the US military is the largest emitter of greenhouse gases of all institutions in the world\u2014more than entire countries\u2014and points to his recent New York Times<\/em> op-ed<\/a> in which he argues that a US-China cold war would be a climate disaster.<\/p>\n

In a field that has been traditionally dominated by men, Quincy is searching for a woman to serve as its president. Suzanne DiMaggio, the only woman among the founders, will serve as chair of Quincy\u2019s board of directors. A senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on the Middle East and East Asia, she grew up in a half-Japanese, half-Italian family in New Jersey. \u201cI remember going on a field trip to the United Nations as a girl and feeling very at home there,\u201d she says, and she ended up working there during John Bolton\u2019s tenure as George W. Bush\u2019s UN ambassador. \u201cI don\u2019t think there\u2019s anyone in the field of international relations that I disagree with more than John Bolton,\u201d she adds, a week after it appeared that the Trump administration, following Bolton\u2019s advice, might start a war with Iran.<\/p>\n

The interim president of Quincy is Andrew Bacevich, a Massachusetts-based retired academic and regular Nation<\/em> contributor who identifies as conservative. \u201cThe Quincy Institute is premised on the notion that there is a potential for forging a coalition between people on the right who don\u2019t like the direction of US policy and people on the left,\u201d he says. \u201cWe don\u2019t have to agree with one another on issues not related to America\u2019s role in the world, but there\u2019s plenty of room for agreement with regard to America\u2019s role in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bacevich, a former army colonel who served in Vietnam, admits he was slow to recognize the alignment between parts of the left and the right on foreign policy. \u201cI had a bias against progressives with regard to foreign policy that I hadn\u2019t really bothered to examine,\u201d he says. \u201cIt was only after the Cold War went away and after this pattern of ill-advised behavior on our part began to take shape that I began to realize that the critique that came from the left had far greater merit than I had been willing to concede.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is referring, above all, to the post-9\/11 wars: the catastrophic 2003 invasion of Iraq and the nearly 18-year quagmire in Afghanistan, as well as the smaller, more clandestine operations everywhere from Niger to Yemen. Quincy\u2019s founding members say again and again that 9\/11 and the Iraq War were turning points in their careers.<\/p>\n

Parsi, who was born in Iran and raised in Sweden, moved to Washington in September 2001 to pursue a PhD in international affairs, intending to write a dissertation about Afghanistan. But then, he says, \u201cthe week after school started, 9\/11 happened and Washington, overnight, was saturated with Afghan experts.\u201d So instead, he turned his attention to the regional struggle between Israel and Iran. He says he founded the National Iranian American Council to give Iranian Americans a voice in Washington and eventually used it to support Obama\u2019s Iran deal, which he and other founders cite as a model for diplomacy that avoids war.<\/p>\n

Clifton, a college freshman at the time of the attacks, became a prot\u00e9g\u00e9 of Jim Lobe, the Washington bureau chief of Inter Press Service, whose long-running, progressive realist foreign policy website LobeLog<\/em> will soon be renamed and absorbed into Quincy. Under Lobe\u2019s tutelage, Clifton came to understand the rush to war as a product of deeply entrenched moneyed interests. And Wertheim, who was in high school in the suburbs of Washington during 9\/11, says the Iraq War run-up spurred his academic interest in US foreign policy. This eventually led to a dissertation on the debates over internationalism during World War II that were resolved in favor of the US-led global order that he now wants to see rolled back.<\/p>\n

Parsi, Clifton, and Wertheim are all representative of a generation of experts who have built their careers in the long aftermath of 9\/11 and for whom witnessing the subsequent failure of bipartisan national security policy has been formative. Clifton says he has spoken with academics who have watched their anti-interventionist dissertation advisees move to Washington and embrace the Blob\u2019s logic or stay in academia and maintain their skepticism, \u201cas if there wasn\u2019t a home for those views in Washington.\u201d Quincy, he hopes, will be that home.<\/p>\n

But no one involved has been more affected by the post-9\/11 wars than Bacevich, whose son, First Lt. Andrew J. Bacevich, was killed by a bomb while serving in Iraq in 2007. He was 27 years old. Knowing this, I asked Bacevich if and how his personal tragedy has influenced his views on foreign policy. At first he declined to comment, but then without further prompting, he changed his mind.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn a small way, I\u2019m trying to honor his sacrifice,\u201d he told me. \u201cI personally think the thousands of lives we\u2019ve lost have been wasted. But if an effort can be made to learn from our mistakes so that we don\u2019t repeat them, then perhaps we can say that there was some value to the sacrifices made by our soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere. I\u2019ll just leave it at that.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clarification: This article has been updated to specify that Charles Koch is supporting the Quincy Institute. His brother, David Koch, is not involved.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

__________________________________________________<\/p>\n

David Klion is an editor at\u00a0<\/em>Jewish Currents\u00a0<\/em>and has written for\u00a0<\/em>The Nation, The New York Times, The Guardian, and other publications.<\/em><\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 thenation.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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