The Quincy Institute self-defines as a foundation dedicated to a responsible and restrained foreign policy with the stated intention of “mov[ing] US foreign policy away from endless war and toward vigorous diplomacy in the pursuit of international peace.” It is seeking to fund an annual budget of $5-6 million, enough to employ twenty or more staffers.

The Quincy Institute claims correctly that many of the other organizations dealing with national security and international affairs inside the Beltway are either 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 the truly interesting aspect of their organization is its funding. Its most prominent contributors are left of center George Soros and right of center and libertarian leaning Charles Koch. That is what is attracting the attention coming from media outlets like The Nation on the progressive side and Foreign Policy from the conservatives. That donors will demand their pound of flesh is precisely the problem with the Quincy vision as money drives the political process in the United States while also fueling the Establishment’s military-industrial-congressional complex that dominates the national security/foreign policy discussion.

There will be inevitably considerable ideological space between people who are progressive-antiwar and those who call themselves “realists” that will have to be carefully bridged lest the group begin to break down in squabbling over “principles.” Some progressives of the Barack Obama variety will almost certainly push for the inclusion of Samantha Power R2P types who will use abuses in foreign countries to argue for the US continuing to play a “policeman for the world” role on humanitarian grounds. And there will inevitably be major issues that Quincy will be afraid to confront, including the significant role played by Israel and its friends in driving America’s interventionist foreign policy.

Nevertheless, the Quincy Institute is certainly correct in its assessment that there is significant war-weariness among the American public, particularly among returning veterans, and there is considerable sentiment supporting a White House change of course in its national security policy. But it errs in thinking that America’s corrupted legislators will respond at any point prior to their beginning to fail in reelection bids based on that issue, which has to be considered unlikely. Witness the current Democratic Party debates in which Tulsi Gabbard is the only candidate who is even daring to talk about America’s disastrous and endless wars, suggesting that the Blob assessment that the issue is relatively unimportant may be correct.

Money talks. Where else in the developed world but the United States can a multi-billionaire like Sheldon Adelson legally and in the open spend a few tens of millions of dollars, which is for him pocket change, to effectively buy an entire political party on behalf of a foreign nation? What will the Quincies do when George Soros, 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, calls up the Executive Director and suggests that he would like to see a little more pushing of whatever is needed to build democracy in Belarus? Soros, who has doubled his spending for political action in this election cycle, is not doing so for altruistic reasons. And he might reasonably argue that one of the four major projects planned by the Quincy Institute, headed by investigative journalist Eli Clifton, is called “Democratizing Foreign Policy.”

Why are US militarism and interventionism important issues? They are beyond important – and would be better described as potentially life or death both for the United States and for the many nations with which it interacts. And there is also the price to pay by every American domestically, with the terrible and unnecessary waste of national resources as well human capital driving American ever deeper into a hole that it might never be able to emerge from.

As Quincy is the newcomer on K Street, it is important to recognize what the plethora of foundations and institutes in Washington actually do in any given week. To be sure, they produce a steady stream of white papers, press releases, and op-eds that normally only their partisan supporters bother to read or consider. They buttonhole and talk to congressmen or staffers whenever they can, most often the staffers. And the only ones really listening among legislators are the ones who are finding what they hear congenial and useful for establishing a credible framework for policy decisions that have nothing to do with the strengths of the arguments being made or “realism.” The only realism for a congress-critter in the heartland is having a defense plant providing jobs in his district.

And, to be sure, the institutes and foundations also have a more visible public presence. Every day somewhere in Washington there are numerous panel discussions and meetings debating the issues deemed to be of critical importance. The gatherings are attended primarily by the already converted, are rarely reported in any of the mainstream media, and they exist not to explain or resolve issues but rather to make sure their constituents continue to regard the participants as respectable, responsible and effective so as not to interrupt the flow of donor money.

US foreign policy largely operates within narrow limits that are essentially defined by powerful and very well-funded interest groups like the Foundation for Defense of Democracies (FDD), American Enterprise Institute (AEI), the Hudson Institute, the Brookings Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations and the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC), but the real lobbying of Congress and the White House on those issues takes place out of sight, not in public gatherings, and it is backed up by money. AIPAC, for example, alone spends more than $80 million dollars per year and has 200 employees.

So, the Quincy Institute intention to broaden the discussion of the current foreign policy to include opponents and critics of interventionism should be welcomed with some caveats. It is a wonderful idea already explored by others but nevertheless pretty much yet another shot in the dark that will accomplish little or nothing beyond providing jobs for some college kids and feel good moments for the anointed inner circle. And the shot itself is aimed in the wrong direction. The real issue is not foreign policy per se at all. It is getting the corrupting force of enormous quantities of PAC money completely removed from American politics. America has the best Congress and White House that anyone’s money can buy. The Quincy Institute’s call for restraint in foreign policy, for all its earnestness, will not change that bit of “realism” one bit.

For example, the Koch brothers’ Cato Institute is a propanganda operation for Trump’s policy to grab Venezuela and Syria; and for Obama’s policy to postpone grabbing back Iran; and it blames the “Libya Fiasco” on NATO — basically on Europe. So, that’s a Democratic Party, instead of a Republican Party, moderate neoconservatism, which Cato is pumping, and that’s also George Soros’s propaganda-line. It is neoconservatism (endorsement of US imperialism), but it is not consistently the extremist sort that’s represented by people (the neocon purists) such as Victoria Nuland, Robert Kagan, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo, Bill Krystol, Nikki Haley, Elliott Abrams, and Eliot Cohen. In fact, sometimes Soros does (or his ‘charities’ do) veer into such far-right extremism, promotion of outright genocide, which neither of the Kochs (nor any of their ‘charities’) has done; and, therefore, if anything, “the leftist” Soros is actually more of a neoconservative than “the right-wing” Kochs are. Soros definitely is more of a neocon regarding Russia than the Kochs are. Perhaps Soros is a heavy investor in firms such as Lockheed Martin, which thrive on wars, and especially thrive on any tensions against Russia, since anti-Russian tensions increase spending on strategic weapons, which are such firms’ bread and butter. But neither the Kochs nor Soros have ever been against American imperialism per se. Kinzer exaggerates their differences — as do most political commentators.

What, then, is the real substance of this new ‘charity’ to propagandize for restoration of Obama’s policy toward Iran? Kinzer says, “Soros is an old-fashioned New Deal liberal. The Koch brothers are fire-breathing right-wingers who dream of cutting taxes and dismantling government. Now they have found something to agree on: the United States must end its ‘forever war’ and adopt an entirely new foreign policy.” However, FDR’s New Deal was much more drastic than anything Soros has advocated; Roosevelt was dealing with the greatest economic crash in history. There’s no comparison. Furthermore: whereas FDR was passionately opposed to all imperialism and was determined to end the British Empire as soon as the German and Japanese and Italian empires would be defeated in WW II, Soros is a champion of American empire very much in the British mold. And, to the exact contrary of “the United States must end its ‘forever war’,” Soros is among the champions of intensifying America’s and Europe’s war against Russia. Not only was he one of the principals behind Obama’s February 2014 bloody coup in Ukraine that was hidden behind massive anti-corruption demonstrations, but he personally propagandized for, first, an additional $20 billion to go toward Ukraine’s war against the separatist region on Russia’s border, and then a month later hiked that demand to an added $50 billion.

On 20 November 2014, he headlined in The New York Review of Books, “Wake Up, Europe”, and said: “the Russian attack on Ukraine is indirectly an attack on the European Union and its principles of governance.” At the website Live Mint, he headlined on 1 January 2015, “George Soros | Europe at war: Supporting the new Ukraine in 2015 and beyond is the most cost-effective investment the EU could make”, and he urged: “Putin’s regime is based on rule by force, manifested in repression at home and aggression abroad. … Ukraine needs an immediate cash injection of, say, $20 billion, with a promise of more when needed, in order to stave off a financial collapse. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) could provide these funds, as it did previously, with the EU promising to match the IMF’s contribution.” A month later, at The New York Review of Books again, he headlined “A New Policy to Rescue Ukraine”, and he more than doubled the amount, to “a new financial package of $50 billion or more. Needless to say, the IMF would remain in charge of actual disbursements, so there would be no loss of control. But instead of scraping together the minimum, the official lenders would hold out the promise of the maximum. That would be a game-changer. Ukraine would embark on radical reforms and, instead of hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, it would turn into a land of promise that would attract private investment. Europe needs to wake up and recognize that it is under attack from Russia.” So, first, his President, Obama, overthrew Russia’s next-door neighbor, Ukraine, and installed there a rabidly anti-Russia regime, and then Soros urged that $50 billion more in debt be created in order for Ukraine to grab back the rejectionist region (which had voted over 90% for the Ukrainian President whom Obama had overthrown). And, somehow, this would produce in Ukraine “radical reforms and, instead of hovering on the edge of bankruptcy, it would turn into a land of promise that would attract private investment.”

What, then, about Iran? Kinzer reports: “‘This is big,’ said Trita Parsi, former president of the National Iranian American Council and a co-founder of the new think tank.” So, who is Trita Parsi, and what is his National Iranian Council? Are they progressives, such as Kinzer implies? Here’s from Wikipedia, on both: Parsi‘s relatives aren’t publicly known, but a plug for him says: “Founder and president of the National Iranian American Council, Parsi was born in Iran to a Zoroastrian family. His father, a politically active university professor, was jailed twice, first by the Shah and later by the regime of Ayatollah Khomeini. At the age of four, Parsi fled with his family to Sweden where he grew up. He came to the US as an adult, and received his Ph.D. from the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University.” In other words: he got his PhD from the staunchly neoconservative JH SAIS, after his Zoroastrian father, a professor in the US-imposed Shah’s Iran jailed him once, and then the Shiite successor Government under Khomeini also jailed him once, and then the entire family fled to Sweden, and then Parsi came to the US — the land which had overthrown Iran’s democracy and imposed the Shah. It’s unlikely that a person who fled his homeland and now lives and thrives in its enemy imperialistic country that’s trying to grab it back, would be favorable toward that country, and toward its continued independence from its former imperial master. This is especially so if Parsi’s success has come from aristocrats of the Shah’s regime, who were stooges of the US — agents of the exploiting foreign aristocracy (mainly America’s oil aristocrats). On 14 April 2017, the neocon site The Daily Beast posted an 8,000-word article “The Shady Family Behind America’s Iran Lobby” by “a well-known Iranian dissident who requested that The Daily Beast keep his identity concealed,” and it alleged that the National Iranian American Coucil had been co-founded by Parsi with money that came from the family of “Mohammad Bagher Namazi, also known as Baquer Namazi,” who “is the patriarch of the family and formerly the governor under the Shah of the oil-rich Iranian province of Khuzestan.” If that is true, then it’s likely a very wealthy family, part of Iran’s aristocracy under the US-imposed dictatorship by the Shah. And if that is true, then the American billionaires Koch and Soros are now hiring the Namazi clan’s agent Parsi to lead this new institute, the Quincy Institute, in order to restore Barack Obama’s Iranian policy.

Furthermore, Obama was very hostile towards Iran; his policies simply were less hostile than Trump’s are. Obama and his Administration continued the Clinton and Bush lie that “Iran is the top state sponsor of terrorism”. Furthermore, it was under Obama that the US Government officially accused — and fined — Iran as having been the state-sponsor of the 9/11 attacks. That lie, and $10.5 billion fine (blaming Iran for 9/11), are neoconservative enough, for most Americans, but not neoconservative enough for America’s Republican billionaires, except now for Charles Koch, Soros’s partner in co-founding what is to be called the Quincy Institute, which will be trying to get Obama’s policy restored.

In an article on 18 February 2019 titled “How America’s Dictatorship Works” I mentioned another aristocrat under the Shah who had become active in US politics, but this one was the second-biggest donor to incoming Republican President Donald Trump’s Inaugural Committee:

Hushang Ansary of Stewart & Stevenson, at $2 million, … [who] had previously been the CEO of the National Iranian Oil Company until the CIA-appointed dictator, the brutal and widely hated Shah, was overthrown in 1979 and replaced by Iran’s now theocratically overseen limited democracy. The US aristocracy, whose CIA had overthrown Iran’s popular and democratically elected Prime Minister in 1953, installed the Shah to replace that elected head-of-state, and they then denationalized and privatized Iran’s oil company, so as to cut America’s aristocrats in on Iran’s oil. Basically, America’s aristocracy stole Iran in 1953, and Iranians grabbed their country back in 1979, and USbillionaires have been trying to get it back ever since. Ansary’s net worth is estimated at “over $2 billion,” and, “By the 1970s, the CIA considered Ansary to be one of seventeen members of ‘the Shah’s Inner Circle’ and he was one of the Shah’s top two choices to succeed Amir Abbas Hoveyda as Prime Minister.” But, that just happened to be the time when the Shah became replaced in an authentic revolution against America’s dictatorship. Iran’s revolution produced the country’s current partially democratic Government. So, this would-be US stooge Ansary fled to America, which had been Iran’s master during 1953-79, and he was welcomed with open arms by Amerca’s and allied aristocracies.

Perhaps Joe Biden or Kamala Harris or whomever wins the Democratic nomination will be able to get some money from the Kochs, and not only from Soros and other Democratic Party billionaires, but President Trump will likely have on his side plenty of billionaires who simply want the US to conquer Iran. All of America’s billionaires want to conquer both Iran and Russia, but they disagree with one-another about the order in which it should be done.

The debate between Obama’s and Trump’s policies on Iran is basically a dispute between America’s billionaires. America’s electorate are just observers. The actual decisions will be made by only the big-money people, because they are the gate-keepers to power, certainly in America, even if not necessarily in some other countries.