As Stephen Kinzer reports in the Boston Globe, “In an astonishing turn, George Soros and Charles Koch team up to end US ‘forever war’ policy.”
While a healthy but not jaundiced skepticism is surely warranted, I say give them the benefit of the doubt to see how genuine and principled this Quincy project turns out to be. Both Koch and Soros carry tremendous baggage from previous public policy endeavors, baggage that would fill the Grand Canyon many time over. Because of such deeply held feelings and beliefs, this new Koch-Soros “peace” partnership is not so much, in many people’s eyes, as the lion laying down with the lamb, as it is the hyena lying down with the jackal. One could point to past failed efforts such as Henry Ford’s “peace ship” or the Kellogg-Briand Pact.
However the sea change in foreign policy towards peace, diplomacy and non-intervention is definitely long needed — before the empire crashes with an economic Tsunami of a sovereign debt crisis and total systemic financial collapse.
If it begins with this new effort and that of The Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity as an impetus or catalyst towards prudential realism based on strategic disengagement and diplomatic rationality and away from preemptive aggression, militarism, and Machiavellian brinkmanship, this is a noble direction the world can only benefit from.
1:13 am on July 8, 2019
