The Irresponsible Statecraft of Defeat

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The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft (QIRS) was founded in 2019 with initial funding from George Soros and Charles Koch, libertarians supposedly working to “free” the world from war. Other funding has come from the Carnegie Corporation, the Ford Foundation, and Barbara Streisand, among other hard-left sources. Of note is backing from the Ploughshares Fund which opposed President Ronald Reagan’s policies that won the Cold War and collapsed the Soviet Union.

Soros is a well-known left-wing critic of American society, a virtual prophet of suicidal anarchy. His Open Society Foundation wants to defund the police, close prisons, open borders, and staff local governments with officials who will not prosecute criminals or cooperate with federal immigration laws. Championing “enemies within” naturally extends to embracing enemies overseas as well. His society is “open” to barbarians.

Koch, posing as a patriot, is different. He just doesn’t want national security to get in the way of conducting his business with whomever he wants. Trading with the enemy is not a bad thing if there are no enemies. As British Radical Richard Cobden argued two centuries ago, commerce is “the grand panacea” that will remove “the motive for large and mighty empires, for gigantic armies and great fleets.” Cobden was a “Little Englander” who opposed Making Britain Great Again. QIRS continues this line, welcoming “the emergence of a multi-polar world in the 21st century where economic power is more evenly shared across nations.” Thus, QIRS wants to erode American prosperity as well as security.

This notion of peaceful globalization has come and gone repeatedly. President Donald Trump’s 2017 National Security Strategy explicitly rejected it. It saw a world of Great Power competition, in particular where “China and Russia challenge American power, influence, and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity.” The classic view of “free trade” was part of the problem. “We stood by while countries exploited the international institutions we helped to build. They subsidized their industries, forced technology transfers, and distorted markets. These and other actions challenged America’s economic security.” QIRS was then created to contest Trump’s nationalist view and work against the policies devised to Make America Great Again.

In typical leftist fashion, QIRS turns words inside out to mislead the public. It claims to foster “realism” when in fact its writers live in a fantasy world. Conservative-nationalists are by nature realists as they seek to learn the lessons of history as a guide to understanding the world as it is. Leftists (and other ideologies) seek to escape from history because its record makes a hash of their abstract notions of global transformation. They hate America as the leader of the Free World and premiere economy because it is not built on their ideas. America’s success mocks them. Thus the U.S. must be defeated, or at least have its motives and actions discredited as immoral, so that we do not feel good about our achievements.

A recent example of the QIRS contempt for history is a column by Mark Episkopos, a Eurasia Research Fellow at QIRS and an Adjunct (i.e. part-time) Professor of History at Marymount University. He wants to abandon the “Munich analogy” of appeasement because “The real ‘lesson of Munich’ is how corrosive ideologically-driven historicism, completely untethered from actual history, can be to the foreign policy debate.” Yet he is the ideologue who wants to reject Munich because it does not fit his desire to base policy on appeasement today.

The situation in Ukraine is as close to a repeat of the Czechoslovakian crisis of 1938 as one can find. Adolf Hitler demanded that the Sudetenland along the German-Czech border be given to Berlin because a majority of people living thee spoke German. This is the same argument Vladimir Putin makes about the Donbas and Crimea regions of Ukraine. Nazi agents were fomenting violence in the disputed territory. In the notorious negotiations held in Munich, England and France abandoned their support for the Czechs, and German troops stormed across the Czech border. British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain declared “peace in our time.” Two weeks later, Hermann Goring announced plans to increase the Luftwaffe five-fold and expand German artillery and tank units. Six months after the Munich Pact, Hitler invaded the rest of Czechoslovakia. In the same way, Putin wants all of Ukraine, not just settle for the “Russian” parts. A negotiated settlement along Putin’s demands, where Kyiv is “neutral” and unarmed, will make it vulnerable to such a conquest. Putin knows history.

With the western democracies revealed as feckless, Russia entered the notorious Hitler-Stalin Pact in 1939. Poland was partitioned (again) between the two powers. The Soviets then overran the Baltic states and attacked Finland to regain lands lost when Russia was defeated in World War I. Putin has the same revanchist goals to overturn Moscow’s loss of the Cold War. He has repeatedly claimed that Poland, the Baltic States, and Finland have no legitimate claim to independence because they were once part of the Russian Empire (the same kind of claims China makes about Taiwan and the South China Sea: once in the empire always in the empire).

NATO expansion is the direct result of Putin’s revanchism. Nations that have suffered decades, even centuries, under the Russian yoke asked to join in collective security to maintain their freedom. There is no comparison between this and Russian expansion, which has always been by fire and sword, as proven again in Ukraine. NATO is no threat to a peaceful Russia but does stand in the way of Putin’s aggression. But as appeasers, QIRS believes that war is not the result of aggression, but of standing up to aggression. It sides with Putin on denying Ukraine any NATO security guarantees as part of a peace settlement. QIRS even hopes that “Trump’s America First ideology” will leave Ukraine exposed.

It should be remembered that Neville Chamberlain was the leader of the Conservative Party. He was not a leftist; he was just weak. When Germany invaded Poland, he did nothing. It was called “the phony war.” He finally resigned when Germany invaded Norway. Winston Churchill took his place, having warned against the Nazi threat from its beginnings. Churchill is now considered one of the greatest statesmen of the 20th century.

In his study of Winston Churchill’s World View, Kenneth W. Thompson notes the “deficiencies of contemporary bourgeois conservatism” which Chamberlain exhibited and which also “blinded American conservatives,” who were isolationists. In contrast, Churchill was in the “Tory tradition… having suffered less disillusionment and dismay over the abrupt and violent reappearance of barbarism… was better able to meet the threat by organizing power against predatory foes …he belonged to traditional Western conservatism enriched by an aristocratic heritage long acquainted with the brutal facts of power and the unending rivalries among nations.” And while “Liberalism and Marxism have marched hand in hand to the beat of a militant utopian rhythm,” Thompson credits Churchill with having “little in common with the proponents of utopian philosophy.” He was a true realist.

What kind of conservative will Trump be in his second term? His support for Israel is stronger than President Biden, who at the UN denounced Israel for escalating the war against Hezb’allah — only to try to take credit later for Hezb’allah’s retreat and Syria’s collapse. Trump should also back Ukraine, since it is also a victim of the Russia-Iran alliance, supported by China and North Korea. He understood these threats in 2017, and the situation is worse today because Biden’s restraint failed to deter or contain, let alone win, the wars that broke out on his watch. Trump should note that in response to his call for a cease-fire in Ukraine, Putin launched the largest attacks of the year. President Trump should embrace Churchill’s understandings of history and duty to leave the same kind of legacy.