George Soros, Charles Koch team up to form antiwar think tank

Liberal billionaire businessman George Soros and libertarian billionaire businessmen Charles Koch have teamed up to form a nonprofit centered on advancing pacifist foreign policy.

Known as The Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, the new organization was named after former president John Quincy Adams, who championed isolationism, according to a Boston Globe story published Sunday.

According to its website, the Quincy Institute says that it seeks “a new foreign policy centered on diplomatic engagement and military restraint.”

“Political leaders have increasingly deployed the military in a costly, counterproductive, and indiscriminate manner, normalizing war and treating armed dominance as an end in itself,” stated the Institute.

“The current moment presents a once-in-a-generation opportunity to bring together like-minded progressives and conservatives and set U.S. foreign policy on a sensible and humane footing. Our country’s current circumstances demand it.”

As of Monday, the Institute was still in its infancy when it came to social media outreach. The Facebook page’s earliest post was from last Thursday. While its Twitter account is listed as beginning in March, the first post was on Sunday.

The partnership is significant as both Soros and Koch are the subject of much partisan hatred in American politics, with both usually being associated with political conspiracy theories.

In response to the news, Nick Gillespie of the libertarian-leaning publication Reason celebrated the creation of the Institute as “a welcome sign that worn-out, old political coalitions are making way for new alliances.”

“The Quincy Institute, drawing financial and ideological support from parts of the political spectrum that aren't supposed to row in the same direction, is the latest sign that a 21st-century politics, one rooted in the way we live now and committed to finding answers to our present and future predicaments, is at long last emerging,” wrote Gillespie.

John Quincy Adams on Islam

In the seventh century of the Christian era, a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar, the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with the preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an impostor, proclaimed himself as a messenger from Heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of the Mosaic law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life, and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust, by adapting all the rewards and sanctions of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE.

Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. That war is yet flagrant; nor can it cease but by the extinction of that imposture, which has been permitted by Providence to prolong the degeneracy of man. While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace upon earth, and good will towards men. The hand of Ishmael will be against every man, and every man’s hand against him. It is, indeed, amongst the mysterious dealings of God, that this delusion should have been suffered for so many ages, and during so many generations of human kind, to prevail over the doctrines of the meek and peaceful and benevolent Jesus (Blunt, 1830, 29:269, capitals in orig.).

In another article they claimed opposition to “threats, sanctions, and bombs”.

To me the relevant item is sanctions. Trump is using aggressive sanctions in dealing with several countries right now, especially Iran. My takeaway is the Soros/Koch cabal is designed to undermine Trump’s use of sanctions in his foreign policy. My guess is it will center on firming up and coordinating European resistance to Trump’s pressures on Iran. The Koch’s role will probably be to persuade international businesses to keep doing business in/with Iran.

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