by Ilana Novick
from truthdig, July 2, 2019
Charles Koch. (Fortune Brainstorm TECH / Flickr)
A new think tank is coming to Washington, D.C., this September, a development that might not elicit more than a shrug (or a groan) if not for the unlikely duo behind it. Two billionaires, George Soros, a liberal, and Charles Koch, a conservative, have teamed up to create the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, which will advocate for ending the United States’ forever wars. Stephen Kinzer of The Boston Globe, which first broke the story, calls the think tank “one of the most remarkable partnerships in modern American political history.”
A statement on the institute’s website says, “The foreign policy of the United States has become detached from any defensible conception of U.S. interests and from a decent respect for the rights and dignity of humankind.”
Aside from both being billionaires, at first glance Koch and Soros seem to have little in common politically. As Kelsey Piper explains in Vox, “Soros is, of course, widely hated on the right for his support of liberalized immigration and is frequently the target of anti-Semitic conspiracy theories. Koch, meanwhile, has come under fire for his contributions to the Republican Party and his opposition to climate policies.”
The institute, which will open in September before an official inauguration later in the fall, is named for former U.S. President John Quincy Adams who, Piper points out, “said in an 1821 speech that America ‘goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.’ ” Koch and Soros contributed half a million dollars each to the institute, which has received an additional $800,000 in contributions from individual donors.
