Funded by the left’s billionaire bogeyman Charles Koch and the right’s bogeyman billionaire George Soros, the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft—named for President John Quincy Adams—was founded in 2019 to promote an alternative to what it sees as an “interventionist” trend in U.S. foreign policy. Many of its scholars seem particularly vexed that America might be insufficiently timid in its relations with totalitarian countries that seek to do it harm. Mike Watson explains:
[The institute’s] mantra is Adams’s pithy quotation that America “goes not abroad in search of monsters to destroy.” . . . According to documents published on its website, the Quincy Institute wants to “reduce U.S. military operations in the Taiwan Strait,” concede Chinese military dominance in the South China Sea, “significantly withdraw troops” from the Middle East, offer Iran billions of dollars of IMF loans “to fight the coronavirus pandemic,” slash American commitments to NATO, and reduce the military budget.
The recommendations [it makes] on the Middle East and Iran are of particular note. For among the Quincy Institute’s coterie of experts are numerous figures who have been publicly antagonistic toward Israel and America’s close relations with the Jewish state. These include Lawrence Wilkerson, a bitter critic of “the Jewish lobby in America”; the indefatigable investigators of American Jews’ dual loyalties, Paul Pillar and Chas Freeman; and leading “Israel Lobby” conspiracy authors John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt.
Bear in mind, the institute is named after a man who in 1825 endorsed “the rebuilding of Judea as an independent nation.” That the anti-Zionist scholars of the Quincy Institute are at odds here with their organization’s namesake is not surprising. In fact, they misunderstand John Quincy Adams’s foreign-policy thinking in general.
As Watson goes on to explain, Adams—a devout Christian—was deeply committed to spreading the ideals of the Declaration of Independence, supported military interventions in the Mediterranean, the Pacific, and Colombia, and not coincidentally was one of the Congress’s most outspoken and passionate opponents of slavery. While he indeed cautioned against entanglements in Latin America that he viewed as imprudent, his approach can best be summed up in the advice he gave to President Monroe at a moment of conflict with Spain: “it was better to err on the side of vigor than on the side of weakness.”
Read more on Commentary: https://www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/mike-watson/quincy-institute-vs-john-quincy-adams/