[Peace-discuss] Another nest of geopolitical experts

[Szoke, Ron]

The Koch Foundation Is
Trying to Reshape Foreign
Policy. With Liberal Allies.

Charles Koch has spent a fortune pushing the American
government to the right. Now his foundation is promoting a
vision of U.S. power shared by many progressives: restraint.

By BEVERLY GAGE  NYT SEPT. 10, 2019

Last year, the new Project on Grand Strategy, Security, and Statecraft quietly opened its doors in Cambridge, Mass. A joint venture between Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the program, thus far, has hosted only a modest level of activity, barely noticeable in the thrum of the Boston-area academic scene. Last year, the program supported two visiting scholars. This year, the number is up to four, all with specialties in some aspect of United States foreign relations.

If the program’s current scale may as yet be unremarkable, the ambitions of its founding donor are not. Created with $3.7 million in grants from the Charles Koch Foundation, the program is part of an expansive but little-noticed Koch-sponsored effort to influence American foreign policy by investing in the infrastructure of ideas: scholars, academic centers, Washington think tanks. So-called Koch money — the billions under the control of Charles and his brother David, who died in August — has already transformed countless other areas of American political life, from tax policy to environmental regulation to campaign finance, all in the service of a radically free-market vision that has made the Koch name an epithet among progressives.

When it comes to foreign policy, though, the agenda of the foundation — which supports education and research and constitutes a relatively small part of the Koch network — does not line up quite so neatly with partisan politics. In keeping with Charles Koch’s libertarian shrink-the-state imperative, the foundation has set out to bring an end to America’s age of endless wars and to reduce the nation’s military footprint around the world — a vision shared by many progressives, some of whom count themselves among the Koch grantees.

Since 2015, the foundation has committed more than $25 million to this effort. It has seeded academic programs at universities like Tufts, Notre Dame, the Catholic University of America, Texas A&M and the University of California, San Diego, in addition to Harvard and M.I.T. This summer, it also granted $460,000 — about a quarter of the start-up budget — to the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, a new think tank that intends to challenge the “intellectual lethargy and dysfunction” of the foreign-policy establishment and to argue on behalf of greater military restraint. The left-leaning billionaire George Soros gave money through his foundation to the Quincy Institute as well, a strange-bedfellows arrangement much emphasized during the think tank’s rollout in late June — and a sign of how seriously the Trump presidency has shaken up traditional enmities and alliances.

Within the grand scheme of Koch-affiliated spending, the foundation’s foreign-policy investments are still pocket change; donors like Michael Bloomberg have given far more to similar projects. They are a tiny fraction of the $889 million the Koch network initially pledged for the 2016 election cycle — a sum comparable to that of the two major political parties — or the $400 million it pledged in 2018.

‘Elite consensus within the United States has collapsed on a whole set of different issues,’ Parsi says. The question is what will replace it.
But the Koch Foundation sees great promise in its targeted investments. With growing public disillusionment toward foreign intervention and a Beltway elite in chaos, “there really is an opportunity for the United States to rethink its approach to American foreign policy,” says William Ruger, who leads the Koch network’s foreign-policy initiative. “And people are open to doing that.”

The dream that an ambitious, self-conscious coalition of foreign-policy thinkers might reshape the country’s direction is an enduring one. In the early 1920s, a group of diplomats, financiers, generals and lawyers founded the Council on Foreign Relations to develop ideas about America’s responsibilities and decision making in world affairs. It was an extraordinary success: Into the 21st century, the council functioned as the high temple of the foreign-policy establishment, providing consecration to countless White House staff members, scholars and pundits.

Unlike domestic policy, foreign policy is often highly responsive to top-down strategy: It generally involves a small group of players, concentrated in or near the executive branch, many of whom attended the same handful of schools and share the same professional language. Witness what happened in the late 1990s, when the neoconservative Project for the New American Century first laid out its expansive vision for “American global leadership.” Within a few years, its basic ideas were framing the Bush administration’s response to Sept. 11, including the drive toward war in Iraq.

Foreign policy’s tendency to follow elites’ thinking, or groupthink, has long infuriated critics on both the left and the right. The Obama adviser Ben Rhodes famously labeled that world “the Blob,” a single misshapen entity whose conventional wisdom seems to keep coming back to life no matter how many times it is discredited. President Trump, too, loves to rail against the know-nothing experts and overcredentialed busybodies of the foreign-policy establishment.
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