It’s a crisis driven by repeated foreign policy failures, a more challenging global environment of competitors and rivals and the rise of anti-war sentiment in American public opinion. That such forces have now combined to found a new thinktank indicates the depth of the crisis of American power. Quincy unites the Koch Foundation’s libertarian opposition to big government and state power with the more chastened liberal internationalism of Soros’s Open Society Foundation, chastened because of the failure of liberal interventions to promote democracy. The emergence of a new elite thinktank, funded by rival billionaires George Soros and Charles Koch from both sides of America’s ideological political divide, could therefore inaugurate a revolution in American foreign policy. They provide a perch for out-of-office appointees, a remarkable revolving door between knowledge and elite power. Thinktanks train future secretaries of state, assistant and deputy secretaries and the broader national security bureaucracy. Such institutions are peculiarly influential because America lacks a significant permanent civil service tradition. They also help shape a supportive public climate of opinion. They incubate big ideas and build elite networks that connect knowledge to political power. Revolving doorsĮlite thinktanks normally keep a low profile but can radically shift American foreign policy, particularly during periods of crisis. In many ways, but with important qualifications, it’s an approach that systematises elements of the gut instinct driving President Donald Trump’s approach to the world. Quincy favours what it calls “strategic restraint”, prioritising diplomacy, the US as a military backstop not as global enforcer of first resort. Quincy, which launched in December 2019, has announced its intention to America’s political class that it will challenge the mentalities that have ruled US foreign policy since the 1991 Gulf war. Their goal is to drop democracy promotion, humanitarian intervention and stop the US from fighting “endless wars”. At a conference on Capitol Hill in late February, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft showcased what it calls its “transpartisan” left-right alliance of “realists”. America’s newest foreign policy thinktank threatens to radically realign the politics of US national security.
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